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THE UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK - BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., LimiTED 
LONDON + BOMBAY - CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lip, 
TORONTO 


THE UNITY OF FAITH 
AND KNOWLEDGE 







Ww 
ot OV9 1926 - 
Le OGICAL ee 


; a 
JOHN A. W."HAAS 


PRESIDENT OF MUHLENBERG COLLEGE 


NEW YORK 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1926 
All rights reserved 


Copyright, 1926 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 





Set up and electrotyped. 
Published September, 1926. 


Printed in the United States of America by 
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK. 


PREFACE 


It has been found a serviceable and necessary plan 
to provide a codrdinating course for college students. 
The best place for it seems to be toward the end of 
undergraduate life, in the senior year. 

After experimenting for some years the lectures 
contained in this volume were prepared as a sum- 
mary for the above use in a college which frankly 
avows its Christian position in the classroom. 
Their purpose is to lead both classical and scientific 
students to a discussion of theistic personalism as 
the solution of the problem of unifying knowledge 
and faith. It is possible to accept the best results 
of modern learning without becoming agnostic. 
The claim of this treatise is that the personalistic 
philosophy of Christian theism furnishes ways and 
means of retaining the faith, and yet remaining 
open to every true advance of thought. 

The thoughtful general reader may find in this 
book some suggetsions to guide him in his search 
for a balanced position, one in which he does not 
have to espouse ignorance to remain religious, nor 
reject religion and become skeptical to maintain 
scientific truth and freedom. 

The summaries at the end of each chapter give 
the theistic bearing of what has been discussed in 


5 





6 PREG ACE 





that particular chapter. “The plan followed is to 
deal by way of introduction with some funda- 
mental problems of thought, and then present the 
philosophic aspect of physics, chemistry, geology, 
biology, psychology, sociology, history, philology, 
pedagogy, logic, ethics, and aesthetics. The final 
chapter discusses the synthetic unity of religion. At 
the end a full bibliography is furnished for the sev- 
eral chapters. | 

May this book be of some small service in the 
maintenance of the necessary unity of faith and 
knowledge! 

JOHN A. W. HAAs. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
Pa all he OH hE A ig A 5 
DOE CONG Prt are Spade ee Lome) elise 11 

PART I 

PROBLEMS OF NATURE 

Pee ORIMAR Ye PROBLEMS coo tinn in nacabete 29 
II. THE MECHANICS OF MATTER...... 50 
III. THE EVIDENCE OF THE ELEMENTS.. 62 
IV. THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS....... 73 
Wee EI PD ORB RIR Ee ocice i icant ii 79 

PART II 

PROBLEMS OF MIND 
V lee oTHE (MAKING OF) MINDY, 2. ohne 95 
VII. THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY... 109 
Mill THE SPHERE OF SOCIETY ) oe. 2k: 119 
Awe tHe LEAD OR LANGUAGE. os 000.0. P35 
X. THE DRIFT ORF HUMAN DEVELOP- 

BAAN Te emt ar MeN GENS a NAC RN Veea a 145 
XI. THE END OF EDUCATION......... 160 

PART III 

PROBLEMS OF VALUE 

HET ES.) OR TRUTH wt cd olen 175 
PLETE COAT: OF THE GOOD Wh a eas. 191 
PON PERCE PH ASIS; ORSBEAUTY. - i lila we 208 
XV. THE DEMAND FOR THE DEITY...... 223 
eT DET Y eo eia een Menage ikea Wh BEAM 239 





THE UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


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PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 
INTRODUCTION 


HERE are many people who have a secret or 
outspoken aversion to philosophy. They look 
upon it as a medley of strange speculations spon- 
sored by men who are fond of castles in the air. 
Where there is no direct aversion the opinion exists 
even among the more intelligent that today phi- 
losophy is useless. In the past, when it stimulated 
the first investigations into nature, it was useful. 
But now that the sciences have been born they are 
supposed to answer the problems which nature sug- 
gests and the questions which it puts to us. Phi- 
losophy is held to be only a forerunner of accurate 
knowledge and given a place in the same category 
with astrology and alchemy. Are these ideas about 
philosophy correct? Are philosophers queer teach- 
ers of past conjectures, revampers of exploded 
speculations? Is there any legitimate place for 
them in a modern scheme of knowledge, or do they 
only rob the soil where real progressive and crea- 
tive thought blossoms? | 
The kind of man who has renamed philosophy 
““foolosophy,’’ and who compares it to a blind man 
trying to find a black cat in a dark room when there 
1] 


12 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


is no cat there, forgets that he is a philosopher him- 
self to the extent of subscribing to some explanation 
of nature, of the world, and of life. He has picked 
up some of his notions and has inherited others 
through society. “These he subjects to certain naive 
reflections of a utilitarian kind. Thus he has ac- 
quired a philosophy and does not know it, for it 
cannot be denied that he possesses some world-view 
of nature, men, things, and God. This led Plato 
to say that, whether a man wanted a philosophy or 
not, he had a philosophy. In distinction from this 
philosophy of the common man, which is made up 
largely of contradictions and old, outworn concep- 
tions, real philosophy strives with great care to 
arrive at a just and consistent view of the universe, 
in the light of the best results of modern knowledge. 
It seeks humbly to find the first principles of being 
and to solve the riddle of the universe. 

The scientific men who sometimes speak slight- 
ingly of philosophy, which is the mother of their 
sciences, overlook the fact that the history of human 
thinking shows that, long before modern science 
began, great men of thought in Greece made won- 
derful forecasts of scientific conceptions which have 
since gradually been established and become the 
common property of intelligent men. Democritus 
gave the world the speculation that atoms consti- 
tuted the basis of nature long before Dalton intro- 
duced the atom into modern chemistry. Similarly, 





INTRODUCTION 13 


narrow specialists of science decry Aristotle, whom 
they have never studied, or they would know that 
he was the first great gatherer of scientific facts and 
observations in our Western world. Osborn re- 
minds us that evolution as an idea began in ancient 
Greece, and that Darwin only gave it a naturalistic 
interpretation in the field of biology. Scientists 
themselves always speculate on the data which they 
have collected or obtained. Consequently they 
always frame a philosophy and often one which 
attempts to explain the whole universe from the 
point of view of their own single science. From a 
part of nature which they have not proven to be 
clearly indicative or representative of the whole, 
they attempt to solve the significance of the universe 
in terms of mechanics, chemistry, or biology. 

What is needed today is a clearer distinction 
between fact and inference than generally prevails. 
Facts are immediate data gathered through obser- 
vation or arrived at by experiment. But often men 
approach this work of observation and experiment 
with a prior notion which they desire to see estab- 
lished. Are observation and experiment likely to 
be completely impartial in such cases? On the other 
hand, will they see what is to be seen and extract 
the right data unless they put definite questions to 
the existences in the universe? We may and should 
be impartial in our reports, but in science we are 
always seeking after the proof or disproof of some 





14 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE ~ 


speculation that we are putting to the test. It is 
possible, like Darwin, to engage in what is known 
as fool’s experiments, i.e. trying out all sorts of 
possibilities rather than working at a definite prob- 
lem; but even in this case we are only ringing the 
changes on some question to which we have a dis- 
tantly possible or probable answer in mind. Buta 
greater source of confused thinking, of which many 
scientific treatises are full, is the failure to separate 
speculation and inference from the datum and the 
fact. 

Much science is so presented that the hypothesis 
is smuggled in, as it were, with the observation and 
experiment, and therefore the impression left on 
the average mind is that all is fact and nothing 
inference. Many of the school books on science do 
not follow the procedure of the careful scientist, 
but so intermingle fact and speculation that every- 
thing is taken by the student indiscriminately as 
fact. In this manner young high school pupils are 
often taught biology, and they accept and absorb 
as established the theories of one group of scientists 
in explanation of the facts. We must seek in our 
American education to use better logic and more 
enlightened pedagogy. To the young we should 
impart only the rudiments of the science, and then 
in the late years of college, when the mind is riper, 
we may introduce them to the various speculative 
hypotheses, Our students need a real training in 


INTRODUCTION 15 





the logic of distinguishing (a) the first inferences 
from the data presented, then (b) the probable 
explanation proffered in the hypothesis, which is no 
mere guess, and finally (c) the fuller agreement and 
consilience of hypotheses that knit them into a 
highly probable theory. “These successive steps of 
a sound logic are constantly overlooked and need to 
be most strongly emphasized. ‘True enough, we 
cannot stop with facts and rest content with mere 
data. acts and data call for interpretation and 
explanation, but we must differentiate between 
what we think we find as given and what the mind 
adds to satisfy its own urgings. 

After we definitely decide to make an honest 
attempt to discriminate between fact and inference, 
we are brought face to face with the question, how 
shall we proceed in our quest? ‘The problem of 
method is never unimportant, but always demands 
serious consideration in any branch of knowledge. 
Of course method does not produce the body of 
content methodized, but it is necessary for the most 
effective presentation of that body of content. The 
reason that there is so much uncertainty and con- 
fusion in our modern thinking, we repeat, is that 
we frequently fail to put the minds of our students 
through a daily logic drill. We must have the 
what, the substance; but the what raises the ques- 
tion of the how; the mass of confused data demands 
order and classification. In fact, so valuable is 


a 
16 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


method in the estimation of modern pedagogy that 
the most thorough courses of training in how to 
present the various subjects of the curriculum are 
felt to be fundamentally necessary for teachers. If 
this instruction is superimposed upon thorough 
knowledge of the content of any subject, excellent 
results will follow. But that is the one danger to 
be avoided, namely, the supposition that exceilence 
of method can compensate for the absence of 
definite knowledge of subject matter. We must 
steer clear of both the Scylla of mere information 
and the Charybdis of proficiency in technique. Our 
proper policy must be to watch both in order to 
keep on the right course. 

How shall we deal with this question of method 
in the study of philosophy? ‘There have been two 
outstanding ways, in the history of thought, of 
approaching the problems of philosophy. The one 
might be called the dogmatic or axiomatic; the 
other the argumentative or discussive, for it uses 
data gathered inductively. A case of the former is 
the modern philosopher Descartes, who after a long 
night of doubt and darkness finally reached cer- 
tainty in the axiom; Cogito ergo sum. This ac- 
quired for him all the force of a central dogma 
from which he proceeded to derive his whole scheme 
of thought. The most marked instance of the use 
of the axiomatic method, however, is Spinoza, who 
laid out his system in strict mathematical form— 


INTRODUCTION 17 


definitions, axioms, propositions, and corollaries. 
It may be of interest to quote the beginning of 
Spinoza’s Ethics to show his method: 


PART I 
CONCERNING GOD 
Definitions 


I. By that which is self-caused, I mean that 
of which the essence involves existence, or that 
of which the nature is only conceivable as 
existent. 

II. A thing is called finite after its kind 
when it can be limited by another thing of the 
same nature; for instance, a body is called 
finite because we always conceive another 
greater body. So, also, a thought is limited 
by another thought, but a body is not limited 
by thought, nor a thought by body. 

III. By substance, I mean that which is in 
itself, and is conceived through itself; in other 
words, that of which a conception can be 
formed independently of any other concep- 
tion. 

IV. By attribute, I mean that which the 
intellect perceives as constituting the essence of 
substance. 

V. By mode, I mean the modifications of 





18 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


substance, or that which exists in, and is con- 
ceived through, something other than itself. 

VI. By God, I mean a being absolutely 
infinite, that is, a substance consisting in 
infinite attributes of which each expresses 
eternal and infinite essentiality. 


Leibniz also belongs to the rationalistic group, for 
he too argued from his idea of the monad in these 
same deductive, mathematical ways. A study of 
the manner of presentation of their views by these 
three philosophers gives us a clear insight into the 
dogmatic method. It is also the one employed in 
the early Greek nature philosophers, who trace all 
the forms of existence from some element of nature; 
in the Eleatics, who start out from bare being; in 
Democritus, the first atomist, and in many others. 
Sooner or later a student will raise the question, is 
this method most effective and does it produce the 
best results? There will be real profit in its use in 
the proportion that its fundamental axiom is really 
adequate and there is actual logical sequence and 
connection in the course of the demonstration. But 
often cogency in the proof is only maintained by 
the exclusion of some unruly facts or the whole pro- 
cedure becomes too abstract to do justice to the ful- 
ness of reality in the existences and the life of the 
Universe. 

More success is possible where the axiomatic form 


INTRODUCTION 19 


gives way to doubt, skepticism and criticism. A 
constructive critical attitude is wiser. The phi- 
losophy of Kant is the best example of the results 
obtainable by the modification of the mere deduc- 
tive, axiomatic method. Nevertheless, after the 
doubt of the old has been expressed, the doubter is 
apt to fall into a new dogmatism even if it takes on 
an agnostic form. “Thus when Kant turns dogmatic 
himself, his new categories prove too narrow and 
exclusive and almost mechanically determinative of 
his system. Modern positivism is also dogmatic in 
selecting what it considers worthy of acceptance 
and in its rejection of religion and philosophy. 
Agnosticism as found, e.g. in Spencer’s First Prin- 
ciples, seems very humble, but in the end it feels 
qualified to perform the very ambitious task of 
drawing a line between the Knowable and Un- 
knowable, and then it proceeds of its own dog- 
matically to construct a philosophic system. His 
acceptance of the Unknowable as existent is the 
strangest feature of Spencer’s thinking. How can 
we know that the Unknowable exists after contra- 
dictions shown in the Absolute and the Infinite have 
ruled them out of the reckoning. Despite its ap- 
parently humble attitude, agnosticism as a method 
is bound to fall into the dogmatism of skepticism. 
In fact, the skeptic is the honest, consistent doubter, 
for he clearly exposes the dogmatism of his doubt 
by being so sure. Behind the uncertainty of agnos- 


20 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


ticism hides this same dogmatic attitude of doubt. 
It ought to be clear in our minds that all doubters, 
both the half-way and the complete, are dogmatic 
as to the finality of doubt, and their method is in 
nowise superior to that of the straight, outspoken 
dogmatist of any other type. ‘Thus there is still 
dogmatism sometimes where it is least claimed. 
‘The second great method in use in philosophy is 
the argumentative or discussive which found its first 
expression in the Dialogues of Plato. It is true that 
Plato arrives at very definite convictions about the 
reality of the ideas and ideals, but the form em- 
ployed by him to reach them is that of debate and 
discussion. ‘The poetic temper of Plato accounts in 
part for the literary form of the dialogue. But 
Plato also finds it possible, by the use of this freer 
form of discussion, to value and meet objections to 
his position. He grows richer and fuller in the 
process, and is the better for his unconcern over 
mathematical consistency. His doctrine of ideas 
takes on a wider sweep and vigor in the later Dia- 
logues. Occasionally other philosophers have used 
the dialogue form, for example, Berkeley, in the 
Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. But it 
seems as if most thinkers fear to use this method 
because of Plato’s superiority in its practice. Never- 
theless, the real way of arriving at philosophic truth 
is this way of the collection of data and the dis- 
cussion of their import. The great aristocrat of 


INTRODUCTION zl 


thought and government, Plato, is actually the 
founder of the democratic form of seeking truth 
through debate and discussion, and not through 
dogma or dogmatic lecture. Our own American 
practice follows too largely the way of the dogmatic 
lecture, although it is foreign to our whole genius 
and attitude. It is possible, even though we do not 
use the dialogue form, so to present our positions 
in philosophy as to make them a challenge to dis- 
cussion rather than so many edicts to be accepted. 
It is this method that we aim to follow in the fol- 
lowing chapters. The intention is to provoke 
thought and to put the critical and searching mind 
at work even in the case of the most positive state- 
ments. The plan adopted will be to report accepted 
facts in the field in question and then to draw 
inferences. Are the facts facts, and are the infer- 
ences justified are questions which the student is 
constantly expected to ask. They appear true and 
sound to the author. Has he been strictly judicial 
and do the trends that he approves point the way 
to a philosophy acceptable to me? ‘This is the test 
that the student must apply. 

Another problem of method that cannot be 
passed by without a word is the question whether 
it is best to try to work out a system of thought 
through analysis or through synthesis. Analysis is 
a necessity. It is not mere curiosity that leads us to 
divide and subdivide things and ideas. From the 


22 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


early questionings and explorations of the child up 
into the riper years, anaylsis is a tool in constant 
use. But are we through when we are through 
analyzing, or ought we to analyze in order to make 
all the better job of the work of reconstruction? 
Surely synthesis is the complement and fulfilment 
of analysis. Mere analytical thought is dissection, 
but the analysis that paves the way to a richer syn- 
thesis is creative thought. Apply this now to phi- 
losophy, and we will decide that the better way 
will be to carry the work of analysis down to the 
last subdivision and then to address ourselves to the 
complementary task of synthesis and do the best 
piece of intellectual reconstruction we know how, 
using the materials supplied by analysis to replace 
our former world with one much more intelligible 
to us. 

At its inception philosophy was an effort to 
reduce the seeming complexity of the universe to the 
simple terms of a single material principle. It was 
all very natural that the mind should seek this sim- 
plification first in the world without, in water, air, 
fire, etc. Any single, all-pervading substance ap- 
parently would satisfy that inextinguishable thirst 
of the mind for unity which produces monism. But 
as thinking continued, could philosophers keep on 
assuming that the simplest form of matter would 
furnish an adequate solution of their main problem? 
A great advance was made when atomism was hit 





INTRODUCTION 23 


upon as the way in which a material analysis might 
give us the clue to the riddle of the universe. But 
now that the atom, even in its latest composite 
form, has been tried out, is the fact of the continuity 
of the atom or electron all the way up from inani- 
mate matter into living forms self-explanatory? 

Is the living cell nothing more than the sum of 
the physical and chemical characteristics of its con- 
stituent parts? It is still an unsolved problem 
whether the chemistry of the brain constitutes the 
total causative explanation of the physiology of the 
brain. The facts of mind, of personality, of society, 
of the good, the true, the beautiful must all be in- 
cluded in any full philosophy. Is the analytic 
reduction of the universe to matter or energy, even 
in the more concrete forms, sufficient, or does that 
explanation of its totality pay too much regard to 
a part only of the universe? ‘The analytic mate- 
rialistic solution of the problem raised by the uni- 
verse in its totality is only possible when we neglect 
or absurdly undervalue many higher facts in life. 
Valuable as it is in special sciences that treat definite 
parts of the whole world, it is too simple to serve 
as a satisfactory explanation of a rich, full, complex 
universe. This analysis of matter which thinking 
has performed in order to unravel the tangled skeins 
of evistence has failed. 

A more promising avenue of approach seems to 


24 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


be through the analysis of the mind. But mind can 
never be reduced to an indivisible ultimate; it is 
always a composite. ‘There is no one phenomenon 
of mind which can explain all of mind. No 
analysis of mind either through psychology or epis- 
temology leads us to any possible primary and 
simple mental element adequate for the explanation 
of the universe. But can we not then take mind as 
the irreducible foundation on which to raise the 
superstructure of philosophy? This method has 
been tried again and again, but it, too, has never 
proved fully satisfactory, either in its universalistic 
or individualistic form. ‘There is in us all an irre- 
pressible set or disposition toward realism, respon- 
sible for a suspicion which will not down that the 
idealist, the philosopher of mind, has juggled away 
matter and produced an unreal world. Perhaps 
this feeling cannot be logically vindicated, and yet 
it testifies to the fact that the danger is real that our 
thinking will create an illusory world. Idealism is 
not capable, by a wholesale absorption of concrete 
particulars into a colorless abstract whole, of giving 
us the full synthetic philosophy. Mind in its ab- 
stract form is out of touch with the kind of reality 
that furnishes the key to an explanation of the 
world as a whole. We need a more comprehensive 
synthesis for that than mind as such can supply. 
That world-view may start from mind, but can- 
not end with it. 


INTRODUCTION 25 


Keeping in mind that our effort, as far as pos- 
sible, shall be to discriminate between fact and in- 
ference, to proceed not dogmatically but suggest- 
ively by argument and discussion to build up a 
world-view through successive chapters, it must be 
left to the reader to decide at the close how far our 
claims have been sustained. 





PART. I 
THE PROBLEMS OF NATURE 


"i y 


HH ae 
ree 





GCHAR TERMI 


THE PRIMARY PROBLEMS 


N any attempt to prepare a systematic treatise, 
whether of a separate science or of a philosophy, 
certain primary and underlying problems confront 
us from the beginning. Certain questions and prin- 
ciples continually challenge us. Can we justly 
begin and carry on any presentation of a depart- 
ment of knowledge that will turn out satisfactory 
without dealing with them first? Even though our 
approach is to be of an argumentative rather than 
a dogmatic nature, and one that gives modern scien- 
tific method full recognition, yet we must not for- 
get that all scientific method rests on certain funda- 
mental suppositions that it must itself justify, such 
as the uniformity of nature, or the continuity of 
causes, or the unity of the universe. And thus 
before we can properly begin to ascend from the 
analysis of matter in physics and chemistry to life 
in biology and to mind in psychology, and so on 
upward, we must pause to determine what are the 
primary problems in a synthetic philosophy. What 
are the ideas and conceptions at the bottom which 
we are using or presupposing all the time as we 
gather facts and make inferences? For our purposes 
29 


30 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


here, the outstanding and necessary primary pre- 
liminary questions are the following: space and 
time, quantity, and cause. 


SPACE AND TIME 


Space and time seem to be immediate facts of our 
human experience. They appear to be given 
directly and to need no analysis. But that naive 
judgment of common sense ceases to be acceptable 
when we go any distance in the study of the de- 
velopment of the mind. When the child begins to 
find the world about it, his first sense of space comes 
through touch—the feel of his own body in his 
exploration of it and the exercises in grabbing 
undertaken by him in search of objects to put in his 
mouth. And it takes some time for him to con- 
struct the third dimension. For example, an orange 
close by and a light farther away will seem equi- 
distant, but the child finds there is a difference when 
he grasps at the more distant object as though it 
might be reached like the one close at hand. The 
philosopher Berkeley made much of the experi- 
ments of Cheselden with a man born blind. That 
blind man came to see and when he began to see he 
stretched forth his hand for the distant object like 
a child and had no sense of depth in space. In the 
New Testament we read the story of another blind 
man who, when he received sight, said that he saw 


; Berkeley, Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision. 





PRIMARY PROBLEMS 31 


men as trees walking.? He thus testified that he had 
no immediate visual perception of the third 
dimension. 

The facts of perception in regard to space are 
therefore for us certain experiences out of which we 
mentally construct the depth of space, “The early 
mistakes in the reporter work of sensation are cor- 
rected by the assistance received from such sources 
as focusing and straining the eyes, adjustment of the 
ciliary muscle, the different ways in which objects 
near at hand are seen by each eye, qualities of image, 
haze, rate of movement, and superposition.* Conse- 
quently, the depth to space which we first think to 
be a fact immediately given is a piece of psycho- 
logical construction resting on a combination of 
sensations of sight and touch. If we are to stick to 
our experience we must therefore accept for one of 
our primary principles space as reported on by sen- 
sation and as those reports are acted on by our 
minds. Kant endeavored to give this subjective 
character of space a logical basis by construing it to 
be a necessary form without which the mind could 
receive but not place objects and make a world of 
them as given in sensations. He argued that we do 
not put distances together and make space out of 
them, but that we map out distances within space 
already in our mental possession as a unity. All 

* Mark viii:24. 

* Pillsbury, Essentials of Psychology, p. 166 ff. 





32 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


objects, he contended, could be thought away, but 
space, empty as it might then be, could not be elimi- 
nated. “Through space as a necessary form con- 
tributed by our mind, geometry could be adequately 
explained. Kant also held that space was not a 
discursive concept but a pure intuition. The in- 
finity of space demanded its acceptance by us as a 
way of thought prior to its confirmation through 
sense experience. The great French philosopher 
Bergson gives space a secondary place and his claim 
that it is instrumental to matter is also indicative of 
its intellectual character. Its externality seems a 
by-product of the intellect dealing with the expen- 
ditures of the vital impulse in the work of worming 
its way into matter. 

After we have thus evaluated space as fairly as 
possible from the angle of our minds, there remains 
the other hemisphere of the question, whether space 
really does not have an actual external existence 
which is not created by, but only comes to the light 
of recognition in the human mind. The tendency 
in philosophy today is to find the elements of space 
buried from easy recognition but embodied in the 
direct sense experiences. While the mind acts upon 
the reports it receives, the reports, it is claimed, 
include the characteristics of space in their witness. 
‘There are some thinkers of our own day, therefore, 
who hold that the common-sense acceptance of 
space as an externality is the true one. They claim 


PRIMARY PROBLEMS 33 


that our gradual apprehension of space is no proof 
that space is undergoing construction, but only that 
we find it out gradually. Space thus becomes that 
in which objects are afloat. The half-objective, 
half-subjective view of space seems the more war- 
ranted inference than the view taken of it as wholly 
subjective. If space is wholly subjective it must be 
true either that each of us makes his own space, the 
world then becoming purely individualistic or 
solipsistic, or that space is an imprint left in every 
mind by the impress of a universal mind. In the 
first instance we have as many spaces as there are 
individual minds, and in the second we are carried 
off into absolute idealism with all its difficulties. 
The results, then, to which the assumption that 
space is subjective leads make the supposition that 
it is objective preferable. But taking that position 
does not require us to deny that our minds must act 
upon the reports which they receive of this objective 
space through their sensations and perceptions. 

A very subtle question which grows out of the 
discussion whether space is subjective or objective 
in character is that of the infinity of space. The 
problem was first brought to the front in the realm 
of philosophy by the Eleatic Zeno. His direct in- 
terest in it lay in its use to prove that movement was 
logically unthinkable and that therefore we have a 
world on our hands that is at rest. He sought to 
demonstrate this to be the case through several 


34 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


logical puzzles, of which a speculative race between 
a speculative Achilles and a speculative Turtle is 
the most famous. If the speculative Achilles, the 
ten times faster runner, gives the speculative turtle 
a handicap at the start, he cannot catch up to it the 
way that the speculative world in which they are 
running is constituted. Achilles will always remain 
a lap of the same fractional length behind the turtle. 
While the speculative Achilles is covering the unit 
of distance allowed at the start to the speculative 
turtle as a handicap, speculatively the turtle has 
gone on his speculative tenth of a lap ahead of him. 
Relatively they will be the same tenth of a lap apart 
at the end of the second speculative lap as at the 
end of the first and so on ad infinitum.* In fact, if 
the problem is argued out with rigid exactitude, it 
can be shown that since the two always remain the 
same one-tenth of the previous lap apart and must 
continue to do so because they cannot exhaust an 
infinite series, their position with relation to each 
other has never altered. And so they have never 
moved at all; the idea that they have has been pure 
illusion. All of Zeno’s difficulty seems to be of his 
own manufacture and to lie in the confusion of 
space for purposes of speculation with the objective 
space around us which is no respecter of our 
speculations.°® 


*Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, Vol. I, p. 195. 
* Fullerton, A System of Metaphysics, p. 172 ff. 


PRIMARY PROBLEMS 35 


In the actual realm of space, while we can 
always think of further extension, the object most 
distant, for example, a star farthest away, is a 
definite distance off. Practically, objective space 
lends itself neither to infinite division nor infinite 
addition. It is only in the space of mathematics that 
we have infinitesimals included in finite wholes. 
The logical difficulty in this assumption is solved 
either by making infinity a quality or in assuming 
a one-to-one correspondence in an infinitesimal 
series.© This latter conception is called the new 
infinite. But whether we endeavor to solve the 
question logically or mathematically, it seems evi- 
dent that the confusion here grows out of space as 
thought of in speculation rather than space actually 
measured and found. Measured finite space is a 
fact; infinite space is a mathematical speculation. In 
the new doctrine of relativity which Einstein has 
made known, space in the universe is made finite.’ 
The relative relations in space with which we have 
to do are not thinkable if we assume an infinite 
space in the universe. The finiteness of the universe 
and its space presuppose an objective as over against 
a speculative space. It is becoming apparent that 
it is more reasonable to base our thought on the 
supposition that space is objective and finite, since 


* James, Some Problems of Philosophy; Novelty and the 
Infinite, poe 4 ff... 178. 
* Einstein, Relativity, p. 128. 


36 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


the counter supposition that space is infinite creates 
more problems than it settles and opens a gap be- 
tween the world of sense and the world of thought 
which it cannot bridge. 

Time has often been conceived of as space’s 
double. It was looked upon as a static framework 
within which events took place and could be 
located. This was evidently the thought of Kant, 
for he argues that time is a form of the mind prior 
to experience in the same manner as he posits an 
a priori character to space. He conceives of it as a 
unity, as impossible of banishment from thought— 
though all events might be non-existent—as infinite, 
and as the basis of mathematical thinking. But 
there are two difficulties to interfere with holding to 
the parallelism of time with space. ‘The first is the 
fact that, in our mental experience, time is far closer 
to ourselves than is space. Our thoughts and reflec- 
tions have a time reference in their very nature, far 
more intimately so than they are, bound up with 
space. The inner life of man does not move 
through space and cannot be localized therein, but 
it is of one substance with time. ‘Time is the sense 
of succession and duration. It is the more compre- 
hensive form of reference, because space is excluded 
from direct entrance into the world within our 
minds. 

The second difficulty that interferes with identi- 
fying time closely with space has been well stressed 


PRIMARY PROBLEMS _ 37 


by Bergson.® He rightly contends that to conceive 
of time as a static framework is to confuse it with 
space. [he very nature of time is movement. It 
is always eating into the future. Coming from the 
past it swells out into the present and then flows on 
into the future. But more important than move- 
ment and succession in the make-up of time, thinks 
Bergson, is duration (duree). ‘There belongs to 
time as part of its nature a thread of continuity and 
a lasting quality which leaves its movements not a 
mere lot of disconnected events but imparts to them 
instead a unity of direction that is best named dura- 
tion. Both as experience and as idea derived from 
experience time belongs not to the world of rest but 
of movement. But though time in the character- 
istics just noted differs from space, the argument for 
the infinity of space and the finite experience of 
space holds good just the same for time. In one 
respect, i.e., in the endlessness of time conceived as 
eternity, there is an even stronger trend toward the 
qualitative idea of time. The conception that 
infinite time, mathematically arrived at by remov- 
ing the possibility of limits, is eternity denies or 
leaves out the characteristic which gives real content 
to eternity. Quality must be added to infinite time 
to give eternity its real import. 

The course of recent speculation on the relativity 
of space and time is leading up to a more synthetic 


®* Time and Free Will; ‘‘Duration’’ in Creative Evolution. 


38 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


and concrete conception of the universe such as is to 
be found in the philosophy of Alexander® and 
Whitehead.?? “Thinkers today have begun to deal 
with the thought that time and space belong to- 
gether in a four-dimensional universe instead of a 
universe three-dimensional in space and one-dimen- 
sional in time. In this most recent point of view, 
events and places in space are not separated. ‘There 
is a point-instant in all things and events. Indi- 
rectly even the happenings of the mind have a time- 
space reference. At this moment I am sitting in my 
study writing and one hour hence I shall still be 
sitting here. In reference to my room I have not 
moved, but in relation to the course of the earth I 
have moved 66,600 miles. A realistic view here- 
after of the universe will no longer allow the tear- 
ing asunder of time and space. The two will be 
interlinked in a real event-space. The more we 
think of this newer attitude the stronger its appeal 
is likely to become. 


QUANTITY 


The problem of space and time as soon as ques- 
tions of practice are taken up sets us tasks of meas- 
urement. And measurement of every sort is work 
done in the execution of mathematical demands. 
In their comprehensive form mathematical demands 


* Space, Time and Deity. 
" The Concept of Nature; An Inquiry Concerning the 
Principles of Natural Knowledge. 


PRIMARY PROBLEMS 39 


are the problems of quantity. Quantity is more 
fundamental in thinking than quality. Quality is 
the given and describable in sensations and objects, 
but skill in the measurements of quantity underlies 
and is the main dependence of many sciences. The 
science of physics achieves all its accuracy and exact- 
ness through its mathematical formulas and solu- 
tions. All that separates astrology with its doubtful 
inferences from astronomy are careful observations 
put into quantitative form. Chemistry crosses over 
from its qualitative aspects to its quantitative and 
has its mathematical equivalences. In physical 
chemistry quantity plays an even more conspicuous 
part than in organic. Biology becomes a calculable 
science with Mendelism and its demand for the 
working out of definite numerical proportions in 
heredity. Psychology has not only called quantity 
in with the law of Weber, which states that stimuli 
and impressions increase in relation to each other as 
arithmetical progression does with reference to 
geometrical progression, but it has also developed 
limited methods of measuring intelligence. History 
could not get along without chronology as a frame- 
work, and economics and sociology are employing 
the science of statistics. “Thus quantity fills a large 
place in human knowledge. And its employment 
in practice is as extensive as its use in scientific 
theory. 

Its champions have claimed that quantity pro- 


40 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


duces the greatest certainty, exactness, accuracy and 
universality of any category in human thought. 
Whatever is mathematically determinable seems 
particularly assured, provided the problem has 
previously been put into proper form. ‘The striv- 
ing of sciences of nature is always toward formu- 
lating all conclusions quantitatively. From the 
immense profits derived from the multifarious use 
of mathematics it has been inferred that it is entitled 
to be called the way of thinking par excellence. In 
reaching that decision most stress has been laid on 
its certainty and universality. Kant claimed that 
mathematics gave us sure knowledge prior to 
experience. Whatever experience alone distils from 
reports from outside is subject to variations and 
uncertainties, and produces assurance only relatively 
certain. [he certainty and universality derivable 
from this source are never final. But the knowledge 
derivable from the axioms of mathematics, since 
that knowledge is not primarily dependable on any- 
thing without, is absolute, logically cogent, and 
sure. So Kant argues that the firm basis of knowl- 
edge can be found only in definite a priori knowl- 
edge untouched by the fluctuations of experience. 
Real knowledge of an indisputable sort is to be 
attained solely by a priori synthetic judgments. His 
definition of a synthetic judgment is one that adds 
actual information not contained in the subject in 
contrast with an analytic judgment which only 


PRIMARY PROBLEMS 41 


unfolds in the predicate what is given in the subject. 
If | affirm, for instance, that matter is extensive, or 
that God is almighty, I am only making explicit 
what is implicit in the terms matter and God as they 
lie in my mind. Over against this kind of judg- 
ment, mathematical statements, especially in geom- 
etry, are synthetic and add what is not given in the 
subject. The straight line is not known as in itself 
the shortest distance between two points; ‘“‘the 
shortest distance’ is a real addition of meaning uni- 
versally valid and certain. And by other applica- 
tions of this principle follow other like certainties. 

But in our day this claim of absolute certainty 
for mathematics has been disputed. The French 
scientist Poincaré claimed that mathematical defi- 
nitions and axioms are only conventions and 
assumptions. The geometry of three dimensions 
was held in Kant’s day to be absolutely sure within 
itself as a logical necessity. “Today mathematical 
thinkers by tracing its history are able to show that 
it arose inductively from surveying practice. It 
does not possess any charter to stand alone as an 
absolutely cogent system of thought. If the curve 
instead of the straight line be made the basal defi- 
nition, a geometry of four dimensions which is 
logically as certain as the geometry of three dimen- 
sions can be and has been worked out. In other 
words, thought can project other systems than that 


42 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


of our world of three dimensions and the claim of 
absolute certainty for mathematics is exploded.™ 
The sureness of number and measurements of 
space and time turns out to be only another way of 
saying that a particular system of abstractions from 
experience is self-consistent, but useful only insofar 
as it proves itself applicable when put to the test of 
experience. As knowledge prior to experience, 
mathematical knowledge is not restricted to one 
exclusive form but can take on various speculative 
forms. This limits its force and destroys its claim 
to be the highest and best form of thinking. 
Furthermore, quantitative thought as highly ab- 
stract can never be a substitute for the richness char- 
acteristic of quality. The real world shows equal 
respect for quality. To the realities of life which 
are values as well as mere existences, to the true, the 


“Dr. J. M. O'Sullivan, in his book on Old Criticism and 
New Pragmatism, p. 111, says correctly: ‘Euclidean geom- 
etry has operated under assumptions which have always 
baffled every attempt to prove them. It has, for example, 
been forced to assume either that the angles of a triangle are 
together equal to two right angles, or that through the same 
point, and not more than one, a parallel can be drawn to any 
given straight line. Now, however, it has been found that 
starting from assumptions different from those of Euclid, we 
can develop various perfectly self-consistent systems, the results 
of which are not in harmony with those of ordinary geometry. 
Thus we may regard space as having a constant curvature 
instead of being homogeneous, of being four instead of three 
dimensions, as being such that we can draw (through a single 
point) any number of parallels to any given line, and so on. 
We find, however, that these assumptions involve us in no 
inherent absurdity, no self-contradiction.” 


PRIMARY PROBLEMS 43 





beautiful, the good,’® quantity is not applicable. Its 
usefulness is restricted to natural science or those 
features in other departments of knowledge most 
closely related to natural science, but it cannot be 
used with much advantage beyond these limits. 
Consequently, quantitative thinking has lost its 
battle to dominate all thinking and demand increas- 
ing conformity to its methods. 


CAUSE 


Of equal importance and in some respects of 
greater value as a presupposition to our thinking 
than space, time, and quantity are cause and the 
question of causality. Cause touches directly the 
inter-relations of things with things, of things with 
minds, of minds with minds, and the whole idea of 
the development of the universe. Usually a cause 
is thought of as that factor or force which produces 
a necessary result known as effect in the event. 
Actually no single cause is the mother of any one 
effect. Instead, whole sets of conditions and ante- 
cedents operate to bring about other sets of condi- 
tions and consequences. “The work of isolating by 
means of analysis one feature in a complex situation 
and deciding that it is the main cause is a piece of 
mental convenience on our part. Actually there 

* Aristotle’s mean is not strictly mathematical although 


proportion, arithmetical and geometrical, are used by him in 
defining justice. 


44 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


never is such a single cause, for always many con- 
tributing factors enter into any given situation. 
What we actually observe is the sequence of certain 
events following in the train of certain other events. 
In most cases we can put our finger on no energy or 
force which produces an effect and we can never run 
one back to its birth. It is through the discovery of 
worlds of energy in physics that we have added 
energy as a factor in these sequences called cause and 
effect. No way has been devised to show how far 
all that is causative can be classified under this head 
of energy. ‘There seems to be a causative power in 
mind and a creative force in the highest types of 
mind as it rises up to genius. We must therefore 
not identify cause in every instance with energy nor 
rest content with the fiction that something mys- 
teriously energizing resides in whatever we please 
to call a cause. An effect in its turn can become a 
cause and both be the last members in an endless 
causal chain stretching into the remote past. Where 
did it start and whither will it go? 

‘The question of the whither of this ever-length- 
ening chain of cause was the beginning of the 
prominence given to causality in Western thought. 
It was at its prompting that Aristotle portrayed the 
whole course of nature and man asa striving toward 
an end, toward a final link in this endless chain of 
cause. Socrates preceding him had begun to detect 
useful adaptations between things and to emphasize 


PRIMARY PROBLEMS 45 


their purposes. Plato next associated the great end 
of the universe with the good and was the first to 
develop a teleological or purposive ideal for the uni- 
verse as a whole. But it was Aristotle who gave 
definite logical form to the grand consummating or 
final cause and purpose. Within this all-embracing 
main cause or purpose he combined three other main 
kinds of causes. “The first was the material cause, 
that is, the matter of the universe which was em- 
ployed and worked upon. The second was the 
instrumental cause or the direct thrust responsible 
for the passage upward from the simple to the 
complex. The third, called the formal cause, gave 
direction and aim and exercised general control over 
the causal upward movement that finally led to the 
end and the grand consummating or final cause. In 
fact, the final cause was the realization of the pur- 
pose contained in the formal cause. 

For centuries after Aristotle no one ventured to 
discuss causality. His conception of purpose and 
its working out and the teleology of the universe 
ruled undisputed until the coming of modern 
science. “Ihe philosopher who first attacked this 
same problem in modern thinking was David Hume. 
Prior to his time Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz 
had derived such ideas as they had in regard to 
causal questions from their conception of substance. 
But Hume argued that, as our sources of informa- 
tion are restricted to mere observation of phe- 


46 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE _ 


nomena, cause cannot mean to us necessary connec- 
tion without, but simply customary conjunction 
within the mind. We see, for example, one billiard 
ball hit another. When the second ball always 
moves after being struck a number of times by the 
first ball, we improperly speak of the blow of the 
first ball as the cause of the movement of the second. 
All that we properly know is the contiguity of 
these two events in experience, and any tie between 
them is the product of an association of ideas in the 
mind affirming it according to Hume. Every event 
is separate from every other, and the only conjoin- 
ing of them is the work of our minds acting upon 
the reports of observation. No potency inheres in 
what we call cause, Hume maintained, to bring 
about an effect. An alternative reading of any 
causal conjunction may always be devised. Hume 
reduced cause, therefore, to mere probability of 
recurrence, an expectation arising in the mind 
through association of ideas. But Kant was not 
satisfied with this dissolution of cause. He felt, as 
most of us do today, that necessity must be included 
with sequence in the idea of causality. Cause then 
had a logical basis conferred upon it by him by 
being construed as a necessary form which we add 
to nature for its more successful interpretation. 
Many later philosophers and logicians have taken a 
similar attitude and explained cause as the ines- 
capable refuge of mind when viewing the sequences 


PRIMARY PROBLEMS 47 


of nature. But we are inclined, as in the case of 
space and time, to hold that a binder exists between 
these sequences without as well as within the mind. 
It seems best to give cause this double character. 
Since the rise of modern science we have con- 
cerned ourselves mostly with the one or two imme- 
diately preceding links of causation in a given chain 
of events. [hese secondary intermediate connec- 
tions of phenomena occupy a place of first import- 
ance in the descriptions and explanations of science. 
But once go back of them and the pressure grows 
ever stronger to assume a first cause, which is prop- 
erly not only first in the almost endless series and 
like the whole chain, but which shall be also funda- 
mental and the real source and cause of all causes. 
It has seemed best to many thinkers to name this 
first cause the ground of the universe, and make an 
essential distinction between it and the usual causal 
category. And this procedure appears to have 
strong arguments in its favor. Left to fend for 
itself, a mere infinite series of the same secondary 
causes seems to hang in the air and to lack a neces- 
sary basis. Supplying a first and fundamental im- 
petus and reason for the causal chain justifies that 
chain of secondary causation and gives unity to it. 
This inference by which a first cause is secured 
appears to be fair and just. But let the assumption 
of a first cause be granted and it involves the asser- 
tion of a grand consummating or final cause. If 


the first cause is not only by nature a reason as well 
as an energy, it has an end and a purpose that it is 
working out. While it is wrong to jump at a single 
bound to the first and then by a second big leap to 
the final cause, without waiting to examine care- 
fully and patiently the actual process of the uni- 
verse and note its connections in their minutest 
details, nevertheless the demand remains just and 
logical that we spend the time and labor required 
to unify all secondary causation and to find both its 
source and end. ‘The whole issue here is one of 
granting the necessary satisfaction to thought for 
which it calls and which philosophic logic ought to 
furnish. 


SUMMARY 


We must now ask, what are the fruits of this dis- 
cussion of space, time, quantity, and cause from the 
standpoint of their use as fundamental suppositions 
in all our thinking? Whither do they point? Space 
and time if their objective-subjective character be 
accepted point to the existence of both mind and 
matter. Their responsiveness to measurements in- 
dicate relations of intelligence. Are these relations 
within space and time, or are they suggestive of an 
intelligence above and beyond which has impressed 
itself both upon mind and matter? Quantity and 
all mathematical relations strengthen the force of 
space and time in their demand either for an in- 


PRIMARY PROBLEMS Waimare ys 


dwelling intelligence in things or an ordering intelli- 
gence which has stamped itself upon the universe. 
The only other way out is to assume that the 
human mind has imposed its quantitative ideas 
upon the universe. If we should adopt this view, 
which presents enormous difficulties, the question 
then comes up why did the human mind do it? Did 
the necessity which led to it force its way in from 
the world without or arise in the world within; 
and that question settled whence were quantitative 
connections derived? Are they original either with 
the human mind or with matter, or do they point 
to a mind beyond and above? Causality, in raising 
the question of first cause and of final cause, also 
establishes points of contact with both mind and 
matter. But can we stop with them or are we in 
intellectual honesty bound to press onward to some 
first and final energy and wisdom? Such are some 
of the unanswered problems related to these primary 
questions. Philosophy at any rate cannot stop with 
them but must dig away in search of further infer- 
ences which must be carefully weighed and either 
rejected or confirmed, and permitted to make their 
contribution to man’s growing concept of his 
universe, 


CHAPTER II 


THE MECHANICS OF MATTER 


HEN the term matter is mentioned the com- 
mon man supposes that the reference is a very 
simple objective affair. Do we not see and touch 
matter directly? Do we not taste and smell it? 
There can be no doubt apparently about it. Here 
you are looking out of the window at a tree and 
you are certain that you see it. Your sight of the 
tree is direct evidence that it is there and that it isa 
certain sized piece of matter. But have you ever 
considered that the optical image of a tree differs 
according to its distance from you, and that some- 
how you allow for this difference in distance and 
give all trees within a certain area around you one 
size? If I should look at the tree as it is mirrored 
on your external eye I would see it upside down. 
What corrects its upsidedownness for you? Now 
are you still so sure that you see matter directly? 
Many are the similar known illusions of sight. 
When a train alongside of your train moves, you 
ascribe the motion to the train in which you are 
sitting because you expect it to move. “Touch offers 
more reliable testimony and yet you can be deceived 
if you attempt to distinguish between several objects 
50 


THE MECHANICS OF MATTER ai 


by touch alone. Your hearing can only report 
upon sound waves between 16 and 30,000 vibra- 
tions per second. ‘Taste and smell are chemical 
reactions taking place in the taste-bulbs at the back 
of your tongue and in the smell-bulbs at the upper 
end of your nose. Of course ears, mouth, and nose 
are not sending-stations that project sounds and 
tastes and smells, but just as surely sounds, tastes, 
and smells do not come to these receiving-stations 
from inert matter. Sight by means of light-waves 
is not a transaction with dead matter. “Touch alone 
as it meets resistance and experiences solidity testifies 
to these qualities of mass and weight. Is matter 
really a solid dead lump? What does science have 
to say on this subject? Does it treat matter as some 
heavy, ponderable substance? 

Originally matter was regarded as the real sub- 
stance of the universe and thought to be either 
water, air, or fire in make-up. ‘Then four elements, 
earth, air, fire, and water, were accepted as exhaust- 
ing the forms of matter for many centuries. But 
the speculations of Democritus based all reality 
upon atoms, and sought the secret of the make-up 
of matter in the smallest divisible particle. So it 
was still believed to be ponderable and to possess 
form. But the inference was drawn that the total 
sense experiences, which were supposed to give 
direct evidence of the constitution of matter, were 
not correct from the point of view of their face 


52 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


value, but as signs and indications of the nature of 
matter in itself. Consequently the ideas of matter 
held by the common man could not be accepted. 
On probing deeper something below would be 
found, an underlying substance, which would be 
matter. Even as far back as when Thales imagined 
water as the first principle, his selection of one prin- 
ciple as the norm discounted the direct evidence in 
regard to the constitution of matter supposed to be 
given through our senses. ‘The first investigations 
into the nature or make-up of matter led away from 
what the unthinking still picture matter to be. As 
time progressed matter became more and more sub- 
limated in its characteristics, less and less material 
in the usual meaning of that term. “Today matter, 
through its conception in the terms of energy, has 
been almost decomposed into energy. In fact, a 
physicist of the standing of Ostwald thinks that 
energy is the source of matter. But even if we still 
accept matter as distinct from, but instinct with, 
energy, it is a very subtle and highly attenuated 
substance of which we are thinking. 

The history of the debacle of materialism is very 
interesting. [he counter-arguments of mind are 
not needed to refute it, since in whatever form it has 
presented itself, in whatever shape it endeavors to 
foist itself off as the reality of the universe, it at last 
digs its own grave. ‘The result in the end is some- 
thing so near the border line of the immaterial so 


THE MECHANICS OF MATTER 53 


highly speculative, that it is far more inference than 
observation. No one can put his finger on the ulti- 
mates of matter as direct facts of observation. It 
can only be imagined and pictured on the basis of 
minute experiments in which the facts employed are 
overloaded with theory. Matter, speaking scien- 
tifically and philosophically, is today not a fact but 
an inference. How far is this inference justified? 
Can it explain the whole world or must we combine 
another principle with it to obtain a full account 
of the universe? 

In physics the supposition of molecules, which 
are always in motion even though the object in 
question appears to the senses to be at rest, has 
demonstrated its usefulness in hosts of experiments. 
The inferences of physical science based upon it 
have been justified within the realms of heat, light, 
sound, and electricity. “[his conception of matter 
put mechanism on the throne. Not only when 
taken one by one were the relations between the 
forms of matter such as can be expressed in inevit- 
able laws of action, but the grand sum made by 
inter-relation of all forms of matter leads to the 
conception of the universe as one great machine. 
Matter as that through which the different forces 
at work around us functioned could well be re- 
garded as conspicuously the same throughout all the 
universe. The same laws of attraction and repul- 
sion were found everywhere. Gravitation was 


54 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


present in the heavens as upon the earth. The law 
of the lever was in effect not only in inanimate 
levers, but also in the living lever of the human 
arm. ‘Thus gradually scientists, because the pres- 
ence of mechanical action was found to be so 
ubiquitous, sought to bring everything under its 
sway and make it the all-sufficient explanation of 
the universe. From the days of Democritus, who 
endeavored with his mechanical atomism to get men 
to admit that even the soul consists of a finer sort of 
mechanical particles, there have been many attempts 
to mechanize all life as well as non-life. Mechanical 
action does occur, to be sure, in the highest living 
forms, but does that prove a living cell to be a mere 
mechanism? Is the functioning of an amoeba 
strictly duplicated in the mechanical action that 
goes on in the falling stream? Is the movement of 
the gray matter in a human brain purely molecular? 
Certain functions of our senses are geared to the 
brain, but can that connection be fully explained 
in mechanical terms? When a crab loses one of his 
claws he grows another one in its place, but such a 
process is unthinkable of negotiation in or by a 
machine. A broken wheel does not replace itself. 
The highest spheres of existence cannot justly be 
made subject to mechanical rule unless we attend 
simply to the physical elements present and neglect 
all else in the total situation. Mechanical process 
as the explanation of all that goes on both in life 
and non-life is an inference not justified in the light 
of all the facts. 


THE MECHANICS OF MATTER 2D 


There is an important side to mechanism which 
is often overlooked. If we compare the universe 
to a machine we must show not simply immediate 
connections between the parts, but also a plan of 
the whole. A world mechanical in make-up, or 
even a partially mechanical world, should be pre- 
pared to respond to a request to show its plan like 
any other structure of a machine-like nature. Men 
are inclined to speak slightingly of Paley’s compari- 
son of the universe to a watch, and his argument is 
defective if the thought be that the parts were made 
and then assembled and put together like those of a 
watch. But if you think of the world as consisting 
of facts inter-working and fitting into a unity in 
their operations, there is substance to the point of 
view that the whole of the mechanism of the uni- 
verse involves at least purpose and end and perhaps 
specific design. Consequently, the mechanist cannot 
get properly rid of the problem of intelligence. Are 
there evidences of intelligence within the total struc- 
ture of the universe from the mechanistic angle? If, 
as is apparent, there are, does the functioning of 
energy within matter produce the intelligence? If 
the energy exhibits not only power but power sub- 
ject to marvelous regularity and unchangeable 
mathematical relation, what kind of energy must 
energy be that displays not only power but reason? 
Even in the contemplation of the merely mechanical 
are we not crowded in our inferences out of the 


56 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 





material and mechanical into somewhat beyond? Is 
not mechanical theory incomplete in itself and 
therefore no solvent of the whole universe? 

One of the conceptions underlying the mechan- 
istic theory of matter is its indestructibility. Experi- 
ment seems to demonstrate that, whether matter 
changes from solid to liquid or gaseous form, it 
never ceases to exist nor does it even become less. 
The amount of matter remains the same. But while 
this may be true within the limits of our obser- 
vation and experiment, are we justified in saying 
that it is absolutely true? ‘There is a speculation of 
physicists called the entropy of energy which sup- 
poses that the different forms of energy will finally 
be converted into heat and then lost in the universe. 
If this speculation be true, what will happen to the 
matter through which the energy now functions? 
Must it not be destroyed when the energy disap- 
pears, since the two are so much one in all their 
manifestations? “The assumption that matter is 
indestructible is perhaps to be taken as relatively 
true, but not as likely to prove final and absolute 
in the outworking of the universe. ‘The universe 
does not appear to be a static machine but a struc- 
ture that is always changing and aging. In the past 
it has run through cycles. Up to the present we 
have no strong evidence that it possesses powers of 
self-renewal and is by its very nature eternal. If 
matter is forever indestructible in the full sense of 


a 





THE MECHANICS OF MATTER 57 


the term, it has always been so. Consequently, we 
must assume that there always has been and always 
will be a definite amount of matter in the universe. 
Even if we think of it as infinite, then it must be 
definitely infinite. Were this true there would be 
no real development, and all that ever has occurred 
or can occur is simply the rearrangement of its pat- 
terns. ‘There can be no addition nor subtraction 
to its mass. Consequently, a mechanistic universe 
thus conceived must do away with the reality of 
evolution in the sphere of matter. ‘The definition 
of evolution found in Spencer virtually proves this 
to be the case. According to that definition, evolu- 
tion is the mere passing from the homogeneous to 
the heterogeneous, the integration of matter and the 
dissipation of energy. “The passing from the like 
within itself to that which is unlike affords no scope 
for creative development, and indeed opens up the 
question how the like can be the mother of the 
unlike. Similarly, no actual unfoldment need take 
place in the integration of matter, but simply a 
combination of particles of matter previously inde- 
pendent of one another and possibly chaotic. “The 
dissipation of energy is its scattering, no more and 
no less, which can in nowise be construed as devel- 
opment. Spencer’s definition, resting fundamentally 
upon physics and assuming the eternity of matter 
and energy, is the picturing of a universe in the 
process of rearrangement but essentially non- 


58 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE | 





developing. Moving within its own coils, that uni- 
verse is after all without a real history when it is 
reduced to the last analysis. “The real course of 
development found in biology altogether contra- 
dicts the claims of this idea to be a satisfactory 
explanation of the whole world. 

‘The transference of energy from one form to 
another is another inference of the physicist.* 
‘Through many experiments he has shown this to 
be relatively true. But the theory of entropy men- 
tioned above, namely, the transference of all energy 
to the form of heat and the final petering out of 
heat so that it is lost, puts its veto on the conception 
of the transference of energy as absolute. In other 
words, there seems to be evidence for the inference 
that the world is growing old. The history of the 
heavens shows us stars that have grown old and 
cold. “The moon is a cinder of a world. We find 
stars in all stages of development, passing from the 
nebulous planet stage, which is now held to be their 
original condition, to the gaseous, fiery stage like 
that of the sun, and the solid period like that of the 
earth, and so on to the final extinction of all con- 
ditions for life. The history of energy set forth in 
the heavens shows origins, developments, and cessa- 
tions. Stars are formed by the scrambling together 

***There is no direct way of proving this principle. We 


know it to be true in almost countless instances, and assume 
it always to be true.’”’ (Oscar M, Stewart, Physics, p. 104.) 


hie MEGrANICS:OF MAP TER 5g 


of clusters of lesser wandering stars; these also can 
and do afterwards divide and subdivide. ‘This ac- 
count of the universe does not favor the idea of an 
endless development, but indicates rather that some- 
time a final chapter will be written. What becomes, 
then, of the usefulness for thought of the theory of 
absolute energy acting through eternal matter? Are 
the transformations the only history that takes 
place on matter, which otherwise and in itself 
remains always the same? ‘This must be the ter- 
minus reached as often as you carry through to a 
finality the thought of the indestructibility of 
matter. Since matter and energy are always found 
in combination, must we think of energy, too, as 
eternal? If we do so, shall we say that indestruc- 
tible matter makes energy indestructible by provid- 
ing it an indestructible vehicle, or is it more reason- 
able to hold that energy which gives matter its 
impetus is primary and when energy goes matter 
will go too. ‘The latter seems the more acceptable; 
the history written thus far by energy does not 
point to endlessness and so sets limits to matter. 
The problem of mechanism in nature cannot be 
fully understood unless we properly weigh the fact 
that throughout the study of matter definite results 
are arrived at through the use of quantitative 
formulas. Apart from its mathematical relations 
matter is chaotic. The modern development of 
physics would have been impossible otherwise than 


60 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


by extending the scope of the mathematical meas- 
urements employed. When we study the qualita- 
tive make-up of the stars from the point of view of 
their internal force-relations, we must use quantity. 
And in describing the course of planets, in ascertain- 
ing the light-years, and in forecasting eclipses, 
phases of the moon, etc., we are altogether depend- 
ent upon mathematics. “There is a marvelous order 
in the heavens. And upon earth there is similar 
order and quantitative relationship attaching to 
matter and energy. This account of “‘things in 
general’ does not impress us as the fanciful work 
of the human mind and the mere invention of 
science in its efforts to make the general scene more 
intelligible. Rather are we led to conclude that an 
intelligent order resides within an objective sphere 
of matter and energy. There cannot be a legitimate 
inference drawn by which an energy working by 
accident in matter can bring about an ordered 
world. Chaos can be prior to the universe in time, 
but chaos cannot logically be assigned as the cause 
of the order in the universe. 


SUMMARY 


Whither are we directed and carried as we sum 
up the problems raised by matter and energy? We 
find that man’s study of matter has reached a point 
where it becomes ever more and more attenuated 
and is not thinkable except in terms of energy. Its 


THE MECHANICS OF MATTER 61 


relations are intricately mechanical and consequently 
imply the presence not only of action but also of 
someend. ‘There are difficulties hard, if not impos- 
sible to surmount, that bar the way to the accept- 
ance of eternal matter and energy as the solution of 
the problem of the ultimate of all existences. The 
mathematical relations of which matter and energy 
are compact are opposed to a world of accident and 
chance. Is order a by-product of the workings of 
matter and energy, or must we introduce an intelli- 
gence to explain its presence, beyond and above the 
realm of matter? Have we not good testimony that 
matter in combination with energy is unable to fur- 
nish the key to the explanation of the whole uni- 
verse? Do not major problems connected with 
causality remain unanswered after matter and 
energy have said all they have to say for themselves 
as the full cause of the universe? 


CHAP DER sit 


THE EVIDENCE OF THE ELEMENTS 


HE problem suggested by the term elements 
plunges us right into the history and develop- 
ment of chemistry. Originally, Greek thinking 
began with one material element conceived as me- 
chanical in form. “Then Empedocles gave currency 
to the doctrine of the four elements, earth, air, fire, 
water, which was long universally accepted. But 
today we know of eighty-six elements and there 
may still be others not yet discovered. Nor are ele- 
ments any longer conceived of as mere material 
counters mechanically related. They are different 
qualitative existences. What has brought about 
this change of view and added chemistry to the 
sciences? 

In the Middle Ages chemistry was in its embryo 
stage and was called the black art. Its representa- 
tives, who experimented in their laboratories to find 
the philosopher’s stone (which was supposed to 
dissolve all substances and thus enable men to con- 
vert base metals like lead into gold), were suspected 
as magicians. [hey were thought to be shady char- 
acters, and their hit-or-miss gropings after scientific 
facts were misunderstood. It was due to this mis- 

62 


> 


THE EVIDENCE OF THE ELEMENTS 63 


conception that for a long time Paracelsus was 
regarded as a magician. Because these incipient 
scientists worked with the appearance of secrecy in 
their laboratories they were often held to be in 
league with the Evil One, as is evidenced by the 
Faust legend. They were accused of practicing the 
black art. But there came a time when chemistry 
freed itself of these suspicions and stepped out into 
the open. 

What helped it to become a definite science? The 
first help was the increase in the discovery of ele- 
ments with their separate characteristics. Com- 
posite substances were analyzed, and everywhere 
science found their components to be certain re- 
curring, qualitatively constant elements. Thus 
knowledge was obtained of hydrogen, oxygen, 
nitrogen, carbon, and all the other known elements. 
But this much information was not in itself suffi- 
cient to establish the existence of a chemical aspect to 
the world. The development of qualitative chem- 
istry, the first outcome of evidence furnished by the 
elements, proved to be only the opening chapter of 
a much more extensive problem. 

Qualitative chemistry led to quantitative chem- 
istry as soon as it was found that the elements 
always combined with each other in certain definite 
numerical relations. “The manner in which the ele- 
ments united produces, it was learned, the varying 
composite substances like water, soil, etc. Exact 


64 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


formulas could be written and proven by appro- 
priate experiments in which it was shown that not 
only are the elements constant, but that they also 
combine in a fixed manner. Finally a table of 
chemical equivalents was figured out that is really 
a framework of accurate mathematical relations. 
The scientific character of chemistry was established 
through showing that a definite order is charac- 
teristic of all alliances between the elements. “The 
realm of chemical action is subject to no accident 
but rests upon ordered quantitative relations and 
connections. ‘The same respect for order and law 
exists in chemistry as in physics. 

But there is still another angle to be considered 
if we wish to obtain a rounded view of chemistry. 
It is along the pathway of the inference that leads 
to the atom. ‘The atom mechanical by nature, 
which Democritus conjectured, had chemical char- 
acter added to it by Dalton, who pictured the atom 
at first as a real existence. In the second stage of 
thought about the atom it was regarded as a con- 
venient concept, but finally opinion veered back to 
the first standpoint that the atom possessed a real 
existence. [he atom concept is responsible for the 
whole treatment of atomic weights in chemistry. 
And it was through the development of atomic 
weights, it must be remembered, that the atom 
established its usefulness as a scientific term. Today 
the atom has been deposed as the ultimate unit of 





THE EVIDENCE OF THE ELEMENTS 65 


matter and analyzed into a nucleus possessing alpha 
particles and a net positive electrical charge, sur- 
rounded by non-nuclear electrons. There is a 
minute universe within the circumference of the 
atom containing millions of electrical charges in 
motion. But this newer knowledge has not de- 
stroyed the usefulness of the concepts of atomic 
weight and quantitative relation. 

Now that the chemical atom has thus become 
electrical, a new combination of chemistry and 
physics has been established known as _ physical 
chemistry. It is very interesting to trace the results 
of putting physics and chemistry together again 
after analysis had divided and treated them sepa- 
rately. Itis a proof that there are no absolute lines 
of separation in the sciences and that, when analysis 
has done its work, if our thought puts what it has 
taken apart together again, it will reap new rewards. 
This is the first and foremost value of physical 
chemistry in the logic of science. Physical chem- 
istry has intensified our confidence in the law of 
constant composition, which asserts that every spe- 
cific substance is always composed of the same ele- 
ments present in the same proportion by weight. 
This enhancement of conviction is also true of the 
law of multiple proportions, which asserts that ele- 
ments combine in the same ratio in two proportions 
as in integral relations. [he mathematical basis 
for chemistry remains intact. But in addition there 


66 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


is the very important discovery of radio-activity. 
Its speed in disintegration is independent of external 
conditions or the form of combination in question, 
differing from that of ordinary chemical reaction, 
and more sharply still from that of the chemical 
charges in the energies involved. And yet the rule 
obtains in the uranium-radium series of definite 
atomic weight in conjunction with the alpha and 
beta rays, and chemical analogues occur to the dif- 
ferent radium and uranium elements. It is also 
remarkable that several of the radio-elements should 
have the same place in a periodic classification. But 
these elements, known as isotopes, while they differ 
in atomic weight and in physical properties, are 
chemically inseparable. , 
Physical chemistry deals with the molecular and 
chemical properties of solutions and measures the 
speed of reactions. In developing what are known 
as the principles of equilibrium, a quantitative 
means of dealing with such activities as those chem- 
ical interactions between water and chlorides is 
provided. ‘These principles also explain the differ- 
ent degrees of activity shown by oxidizing and 
reducing agents. The most important of these prin- 
ciples of equilibrium is ionization. It takes the 
molecular properties of solutions and draws from 
them the theory of electrolytic dissolution. But 
while ionization works with molecules, it is a true, 
reversible, chemical reaction. The main philosophic 


ia BV IDENGE OF THE ELEMENTS | 67 





value of physical chemistry proceeds from this ac- 
centuation of the presence of proportion, order, 
and mathematical relation. 

It is of interest to note that chemical action goes 
on in all existences. Exactly as we trace mechanical 
and physical functions in all things from the lowest 
to the highest, we find evidence of chemical com- 
binations everywhere. Minerals submit to analysis 
into their chemical constituents. Because the soil 
is made up of chemical elements the problem of fer- 
tilizers rests often upon supplying missing nitrates. 
Chlorophyl plays so large a part in plant life be- 
cause its basis is chemical. “The nourishing quality 
of the plant that makes it good food rests mostly 
upon its chemical components. The cell has its 
proteids, its carbohydrates, and other chemical con- 
stituents. There is a chemistry of digestion and 
assimilation. “The blood has its chemical qualities. 
The different glands, like the thyroid, the pituitary, 
the adrenal, all secrete fluids chemical by nature. 
The brain cannot be studied and the subject of the 
chemical reactions taking place in it overlooked. 
The production of many kinds of goods and the 
utilization of waste material are all dependent upon 
chemistry. This universality of chemical action has 
led some chemists to claim that they can solve the 
riddle of the universe through chemical formulas. 

But reservations must be made to the acceptance 
of the validity of this claim. It is a marvelous 


68 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


structural network which organic chemistry has 
woven together out of its four elements—oxygen, 
hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen. The variations 
possible in the union of these four elements go far 
in explaining the physiological basis of living forms. 
But after giving these factors their full weight, 
scientists who study the soil have now turned from 
mere chemical analysis as not all-sufficient to delve 
into the biological aspect. “Today it is known that 
certain plants cannot continuously prosper in the 
same patch of soil, not simply because it gets robbed 
of necessary chemical qualities, but because certain 
germs get used up. To keep the soil fresh, clean, 
and productive it must be inoculated with fresh 
supplies of those germs which have been exhausted 
and chemically fertilized. All this greatly lessens 
the likelihood of our ever solving the reactions in 
living forms through mere chemical action. The 
same exception must be taken to the way in which, 
in the study of glandular secretions and the func- 
tioning of the human brain, the advocates of the 
chemical point of view are prone to resolve all 
thought and all purpose and action in men into 
chemical reactions. It is a throwback, more subtly 
put, to the old material statement that the brain 
secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. But can 
this statement be substantiated? Is the whole life 
of man, his ideals, his aspirations, his moral judg- 
ments, reducible to chemical formulas? The error 


THE EVIDENCE OF THE ELEMENTS 69 


in this point of view springs from its exclusion of 
certain additional factors in human life. “This de- 
prives it of the services of the distinction between 
higher and lower and forces it to deal with every- 
thing on the one dead chemical level. In the con- 
tinuity of chemical action the principle of causality 
is swallowed up, and the presence of additional 
factors, such as life and thought, is denied. “The 
complete explanation of the universe solely on 
chemical terms is only possible by overlooking the 
more complex and higher existences. 

Constant pressure has been exerted by the ten- 
dencies in chemistry responsible for the hypothesis 
of the atom to run back the analysis of matter into 
smaller and smaller particles. “Today the electrical 
point of view of the atom nearly eliminates matter 
from the reckoning and derives all differences of 
quality in terms of electrical energy. At times 
speculation on the atom has almost reduced it to a 
shadow of existence below a point. Nevertheless 
the intention has been to save a place for it in space. 
Of late the smallest electrons and protons have been 
given a spatial relation, but one so minute that it 
seems to cross the boundary line over into infini- 
tesimal space, and such a space although still think- 
able speculatively is no longer realizable in the finite 
space of experimental observation. That is the 
danger in the continuous subdivision of the atom, 
the danger of reaching a point so highly speculative 





70 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


that the atom quite loses all serviceability as an 
explanation of chemical phenomena. Also there is 
a genuine logical danger in the growth of the prac- 
tice of treating this hypothesis in discussion as 
though reality existed to correspond. “There must 
be a limit, no matter how finely shaped, to the 
divisibility of the atom, if its reality is to be pre- 
served. Analysis may come to the end of its useful- 
ness in wild efforts to arrive at an infinitesimal par- 
ticle out of reach of all our ways of measuring space. 

There was a time when men captivated by chem- 
ical magic pictured the world as a ceaseless play- 
ground of chemical action operating under definite 
laws. It has been ascertained instead that elements 
are not eternal; for example, radium and uranium 
break up and crumble away. Elements seem to 
have a history although we have not yet fully dis- 
covered the complete story of their building up and 
breaking down. If chemical action thus falls within 
a domain of development and decay, it has lost its 
standing as a constant in the universe along with 
the matter of the physicist. This change of status 
suffered by chemical facts makes it impossible to 
find in them the solvent of the universe. 

In chemical reactions we cannot arrive at a scien- 
tific statement of what takes place unless, just as in 
physics, we do so on the basis of certain laws. Of 
what nature are these laws? ‘They are not laws in 
the sense that obligations to be fulfilled are laws. 


THE EVIDENCE OF THE ELEMENTS 71 


Clear as this distinction is, chemical and other nat- 
ural laws, nevertheless, are often treated in dis- 
cussion in ways that make people believe them to 
be similar to moral commandments. A chemical 
law is, first of all, a statement made by our minds 
in reference to the regularity and uniformity observ- 
able in the repeated recurrence of certain phenomena. 
Our minds would be no match for the kaleidoscopic 
changes of the world without the assistance of this 
power of generalization and therefore when we 
begin to think about the arrangement of phenomena 
we seek regularities of sequence in their actions. Is 
a chemical or natural law of any other sort, then, 
than a mere abstraction of the mind, that and noth- 
ing more? Have we imposed these regularities for 
the convenience of our own minds in the handling 
of a world which in itself is without order, regu- 
larity, and uniformity? If we take the finite space 
of experimental observation as our standpoint, there 
is no escape from the conclusion that we have only 
discovered the laws of nature, and not invented 
them. Nature then conveys to us evidence of order 
and regularity in its actions. The unreliable and 
the exceptional does not rule. 


SUMMARY 


The evidence of the elements has corroborated 
the indications of physics. We have not been able 
to dispel the impression obtained of the presence of 


72 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


order and of law that bears the earmarks of reason. 
Our opposition to accidentalism has increased; but 
we have not met with anything that required us to 
add a third to reason and regulated power as the 
determining factors in the universe. Chemistry, 
however, leaves unexplained many facts, and by 
this display of its limitations points beyond itself. 
Its evidence alone is not all-sufficient. We must 
proceed on our way and investigate other depart- 
ments of human knowledge in order to follow out 
the trail to the final synthesis. 


CHAPTER IV 


‘THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS 


N the modern era of science, geology opened the 
way for the later growth and expansion of nat- 
ural science. Observers like Lyell gathered many 
facts about the structure of the rocks from which 
many inferences were drawn in reference to the 
formations of the crust of the earth. Scientists have 
gradually reached agreement that the primitive for- 
mation, with its subdivisions into the Archean and 
Algonquin, was followed by the three great periods 
of the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the Kenozoic. 
After the early Cambrian stratum, in the Paleozoic, 
we find the first invertebrates in the Ordivician, 
fishes and insects in the Devonian, and amphibians 
and coal-plants in the Carboniferous and Permian 
strata. In the Mesozoic period, ascending from the 
Triassic through the Jurassic to the Cretaceous class, 
we come upon fossils of reptiles, conifers, and 
palms. In the latest Kenozoic period, including 
the Tertiary and Pleistocene classes, we arrive at 
traces of mammals. Man is found at last in the 
Pleistocene or post- Tertiary or Quaternary stratum. 
This is the order of succession of strata as fixed by 
Werner which has been adopted by many scientists. 
fs, 


74 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


Later upheavals explain the fact that in many places 
very old rock formations are found on top of the 
younger rocks. Sometimes a great slant occurs. 
These things have not unsettled the common scien- 
tific belief in this hypothesis. But the fact must 
not be lost sight of that it is and must forever 
remain a hypothesis which cannot be absolutely 
demonstrated. ‘There are facts on which a sup- 
position might be based that the strata followed in 
a different order at different places. 

There is, however, another consideration to be 
taken into account. In the successive layers fossils 
occur belonging to pretty much all the species in 
the order of their rank in the plant and animal 
world. Consequently, this constant upward pro- 
gression to more complex forms makes this order 
for the rocks seem to fit into and square with the 
hypothesis of the evolution of life. This is true 
but we must be careful not to permit it to persuade 
us to argue in a circle and try to use the hypothet- 
ically assumed order of the rocks to fix the age of 
the fossils. “There is nothing decisive in the geologic 
character of the different strata to fix the date of 
one as earlier and another as later, but the proba- 
bility is high that first the strata which contain the 
simpler forms appeared and then those that con- 
tain the more complex living forms all the way up 
the scale from the invertebrates to man. 

Human speculation has changed its mind more 


THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS ifs 


than once about the force or forces that have formed 
the earth. At one time water was put forward as 
the cause—this was called the Neptune theory— 
and substantiation for it was apparently found in 
the discovery of forms of sea-life on high moun- 
tains. But today, while it is granted that certain 
portions of land have emerged from under water 
while others have been flooded and submerged, the 
action of water is not held to be the universal cause 
but only a contributory one. ‘The action of the 
glaciers is at present assumed to be the general cause 
of the present lay of the land over great parts of 
the earth since large areas of the continents, it is 
believed, were covered long ago by a great ice-crust. 
Changes are still taking place on the earth, and the 
not infrequent earthquakes in certain sections, in 
California and Japan, for example, are explained as 
the settling of the earth along the line of great 
faults or cracks in its sides. Volcanic action also is 
still continuously going on inside the globe. This 
proves that the earth has a history and is not 
changelessly eternal. “The conception of a single 
great cause committed to uniformity of action is 
purely speculative. “There have been objectors to 
it. This principle overrides many details of obser- 
vation that might be thought to point to greater 
variations than can be cared for by it. But perhaps 
it will be found preferable to the opposite assump- 
tion of many and varying causes. Back of the trust 





76 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 





in the assumption of a single great cause lies a 
certain set of the mind that will not rest content 
with chaotic or complex accidentalism. Even where, 
as in geology, the evidence for order and uniformity 
is not as definite as in other sciences, the mind clings 
to it. The trend of scientific thinking shows that 
speculation is never likely to remain content with 
mere fortuitousness. 

Another assumption, by which the age of the 
earth and the time expanse of the different strata 
are fixed, is that of regularity of pace in its changes. 
The amount of change that is now going on in a 
definite interval is observed and taken as a standard 
of measurement for all past time. When we observe 
how many inches of the rocks below Niagara Falls 
destroys per year, we estimate the time it took them 
to eat away the present gorge. We calculate in the 
same manner the time span of other rock detritions 
and thus arrive at millions of years as the time re- 
quired for the earth to become what it is today. 
This whole chronology is founded upon the con- 
ception of uniform action at a constant rate of 
regularity in the processes of nature. “There are few 
or no facts except those of present observations in 
support of this hypothesis. Changes might have 
gone on more rapidly on the earth in the past. 
Great upheavals might have occurred suddenly. In 
some years much deeper beds of silt might have been 
deposited. Can such conjectures be ruled out as 


THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS a7 


altogether impossible? Do not the varying thick- 
nesses which are found in the layers of rings in old 
trees seem to tell the story of varying years of 
change? And yet despite these possibilities, scien- 
tific thinking remains wedded to the principle of 
uniformity. It can make no allowances for the 
possibilities of varying actions. What does this 
prove? It demonstrates again the trend of the 
human mind to dispose the flux around into an 
orderly world of regular processes, even though this 
procedure cannot be fully justified. It is the as- 
sumption, just the same, that best satisfies the 
searching mind intent on finding the patterns energy 
employs. Where the significance of the facts is not 
altogether clear, inference may go beyond the evi- 
dence to bring a given group of scientific data into 
unity with other scientific conclusions. 

Apart from their speculative side, the facts of 
geology might be used to support the conception of 
an earth formed by great forces working blindly 
and the final result arrived at as just a happen so. 
Indeed, there have been geologists who have told 
the story of the earth in a manner to create the 
impression that it is the work of arbitrary power 
and force alone. ‘There appears to be no place in 
their version of that story for intelligence and end. 
But if we couple geology with biology this idea of 
blind, unreasoning energy as its source has to be 
thrown overboard, “The fossils considered in rela- 


78 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


tion to the different strata in which they are found 
display connections and adjustments between earth 
and these living forms which it is hard to explain 
as merely accidental. Could there be such an 
accumulation of accidental inter-relations at all 
stages? Is the whole question of the geographical 
distribution of animals, to which geology is related 
in part, explicable as chance? ‘The glacier grinds 
down the rocks and forms the soil, and the plant is 
only able to grow in the soil thus formed. Are 
these chains of results only the product of repeated 
accidents? 


SUMMARY 


The signposts of geology do not supply any 
additional guidance toward the solution of the 
problem of power and intelligence beyond that fur- 
nished by physics and chemistry. In fact, its 
pointers are not as definite. Nevertheless, the great 
inter-relations of the universe that crop out even in 
geology seem to demand more than energy as their 
explanation. In fact, the speculative side of the 
- mind is never satisfied with irregularity and mere 
accident as an explanation of any natural process. 


CHAPTERTY 


THE LIFT OF LIFE 


F we had to stop here, with the accumulations of 
fact and inference secured for us by physics, 
astronomy, chemistry, and geology, including 
mineralogy with its account of definite geometrical 
forms, we would be shut up in trying to account 
for what we had taken account of in the universe 
to indications of energy and order. ‘These indica- 
tions, however, if all possible cogency be allowed 
them, are not enough to create in our minds any 
conclusion in regard to the rounded whole of things, 
possessing more than a fair degree of probability. 
But when we come to organic beings and the prob- 
lem of life we enter a realm from which definite 
confirmation may be obtained of the presence of 
order, reason, plan, and purpose in the universe. 
Pringle-Pattison holds that the coming of the 
modern age of biology has reinstated teleology, or 
the accounting for the universe from the point of 
view of end and purpose, in our confidence. Of 
course the first reaction of Darwin to the old argu- 
ment for fixed design through fixed species led his 
followers for a time to a lack of appreciation of 
what the biological evidence meant. Huxley, how- 
79 


A LE EA ER, SS ENE cee nee FY | 
80 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


ever, saw the purposive implication of evolution. 
But before we approach the argument for purpose 
as found in modern biology let us ask the question: 
What is life? 

The reply to this query is exceedingly difficult. 
If we elect to remain within the realm of observed 
phenomena we shall call those forms living which 
are characterized by a direct adjustment of inner 
functioning to outer relations, shown in assimila- 
tion and reproduction, birth, growth and decay, 
metabolism and inner organic unity. Is life merely 
a common name for these processes? ‘This is as 
far as a biologist can go on the basis of immediate 
observation. But other thinkers have gone on to 
speak of a dominant of life in living forms, a some- 
thing mysterious but not to be dispensed with in 
explaining the processes of living bodies. They 
attempt by inference to go beyond observation. But 
thus far every inference as to life only adds another 
mystery. When we cross the threshold from phys- 
ical life to mental life the problem as to what con- 
stitutes life in itself does not become clearer but 
on the contrary more involved. Life as seen by 
the biologist remains confined to the descriptive, 
and when we ask for a fuller explanation we must 
seek it in the later stages of our synthetic task among 
the probabilities of speculation. 

The origin of life has been a continuous puzzle 
to the student of life, and he cannot finally rest 


PEL OAL IEE 81 


oe 





satisfied with the links in the chain supplied by the 
origin of species. Many biologists take life as some- 
thing given and do not inquire into its ultimate 
origin, and yet in any philosophic effort to under- 
stand it worth its salt this question cannot be thus 
brushed to one side. Some thinkers have sought to 
disprove the accepted statement, Omne vivum ex 
vivo (Every living thing comes from a living 
thing). “They have attempted to prove the via- 
bility of the non-living by keeping tissue of de- 
ceased bodies alive and then endeavoring to discover 
how the trick was done. Others have claimed to 
produce life from sterilized broth. But none of 
these efforts thus far has succeeded, and the question 
is still open. Some speculators have tried the 
mechanical solution. They have taken, for in- 
stance, the desire of a moth to fly into the light— 
which is an example of what is known as a tropism 
—as illustrative of the explanation that life in its 
sum total is a tropism, a thrust given living objects 
by mechanical forces that ends in a mental dispo- 
sition. But this theory has not met with much 
real favor. ‘There seems to have been more promise 
in the chemical approach to life. But the analysis 
of the cell into proteids, carbohydrates, etc., comes 
far short of the full explanation of the cell with its 
germ-plasm, nucleus, and its chromosomes. Per- 
haps the mistake has been in depending too much 
upon analysis instead of trying to correlate the facts 


82 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


into a synthetic whole. At least, no gains in the 
way of acceptable results have come from any of 
the efforts made to get below the unity of the cell. 

The fruitful study of life begins with the single 
cell and passes from it to the polycellular forms of 
ever more complex structures. The secret of the 
cell as studied today is tied up with the problem of 
heredity. “Through the researches of the Austrian 
monk Mendel, hereditary strains can be definitely 
calculated. ‘There is an exact, mathematically ex- 
pressible relation between the pure and mixed traits 
in any cell. ‘The traits of our ancestors are not 
handed on in any random form but in an orderly 
manner. The question whether fixed character- 
istics alone are handed on or acquired traits as well 
does not affect the good standing of the law of 
heredity. There is no element of chance present here 
but a marvelously consistent and permanent regu- 
larity of operation from generation to generation. 

Confidence in this reading of life is accentuated 
by the study of embryology. Each embryo, it is 
found, passes through certain stages common to all. 
In the process of development the remarkable fact 
is that in their early embryonic existence the higher 
forms are like the lower forms. Scientists have 
therefore conjectured that embryology gives a 
demonstration of the original order in the evolution 
of living forms, but this is not the question that 
concerns us now. ‘The important fact for the uses 


Pe iets Ob Es 83 


of philosophy is that there is a definite order in the 
development of life forms to which there is no 
exception. And finally, no matter what we con-— 
jecture concerning its past history, every embryo 
reaches a definite end. And this end is now fixed 
within the limits of a species.t Whatever variations 
take place and whatever may be the flowing rela- 
tions between species, nevertheless every species 
completes its embryonic development according to 
the pattern of its own kind. ‘This is the outcome 
at this end whatever may have been the original 
start at the other. And there is a fixity of order, 
aim, and purpose throughout the whole embryonic 
development of any form. It is this fact which 
adds teleological elements to sound speculation as to 
the origin of the process. In other words, the fair 
inference from embryology in the final summing up 
is in favor of the presence of purpose. 

What are the characteristics of an organism? 
Every living form, from the lowest of plants to the 
highest of mammals, is a coGperative enterprise. 
‘There is a common functioning as well as an inter- 
relation of all parts. While the use of all the 
vestigial organs cannot be explained as the offices 
performed by the thyroid gland and the vermiform 
appendix are now explained, yet these remnants 

* “Tt is only in the very early stages that the embryo of man 
could be confused with that of any other creature; and even 
in the early stages microscopical examination reveals spe- 


cificity.’ (J. Arthur bomen What Is Man? p. 8.) 


84 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


were all probably useful at some period in the past 
and not useless baggage from the beginning. When 
one organ varies, its fellows must also vary. It is 
impossible that even the slightest change should 
occur in any member of an organism without that 
change affecting the whole. A living organism is 
not a mere sum of its parts. It differs from a 
machine which, while made up of parts that codp- 
erate, is unable to feed and assimilate and attend to 
its self-renewal. ‘There is an end in the functioning 
of the whole which is another story from the one 
told by the codperations between the parts. Even 
after we have described all the processes going on 
within the parts we have still said nothing as to 
what the organism as a whole is for and can do. 
An organism is a sovereignty with not only home 
but foreign relations. No physician can cure any 
organ without knowing the life of the whole man 
both at home and abroad. What do doctors mean 
when they speak of the constitution of a sick patient 
as a factor in the cure? What is this constitution 
but a name for a functioning attributable to a whole 
which is over and above the sum of its parts. The 
close life and death connection of heart and lungs, 
of stomach, liver, and kidneys, needs no demon- 
stration. Haldane confesses his inability to explain 
the physiology of an organism in full in respect to 
its fine adjustments by either mechanical or chemical 
means Of explanation. More seems to be implied 





ie te Ob ers 85 


than is going on in its processes. An organism as 
a whole is functioning to an end of itsown. ‘There 
has been too little study of the nature of the pur- 
pose which inference naturally draws and declares 
belongs to an organic structure in living bodies. 
The failure to follow up or even draw this infer- 
ence weakens much biological speculation. 

As to whether the variations took place through 
very minute gradual changes or in sudden muta- 
tions, the philosopher is not concerned. His query 
is, rather whether the variations were accidental and 
fortuitous, no matter how long or short the time 
interval. For Darwin the changes had taken place 
accidentally; he could see no plan in them. Are 
we pinned down to take this view by the results of 
the observation of the variations? ‘The variations 
that fitted into the conditions of survival are the 
only ones left to tell the tale. Out of millions of 
possible variations certain ones won the day. Were 
these successful changes the outcome of chance? We 
may attack the problem first as a mathematical ques- 
tion to be solved by the application of the doctrine 
of chance and probability. As probabilities are 
weighed and counted, it cannot be maintained that 
the adaptations which resulted were beyond the 
pale of the probable. “The comparison will be 
much more to the point, however, if we compare 
what took place to the throwing of dice in which 
certain numbers are repeated and certain results 


86 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


obtained because the dice are loaded. How can the 
inter-relations of thousands of variations in any 
species to variations in environment, and to other 
species, be explained on the basis of mere chance? 
And we can observe these innumerable inter-lock- 
ings connected with every step of advance in evo- 
lution. It is only as we rope off a small area and 
confine ourselves to the changes in one species or in 
one living form of a species that accidentalism as 
an explanation is even remotely plausible. Darwin 
was after all a better observer than a philosophic 
generalizer on a large scale. 

It is very remarkable that, apart from the term 
variation, most of the other terms employed to de- 
scribe the development of life imply purpose. Evo- 
lution as a term seems to denote not merely suc- 
cession in time, but rather a constant increase of 
complexity which must be construed as the hall- 
mark of a tendency toward a great end. It does 
not necessarily mean the unfolding of the infolded. 
Natural selection as a process should mean actual 
choice as an outcome. But how can the outcome 
of a process of fortuitous variation deserve to be 
named a selection? Darwin derived his term by 
likening the process of nature to the artificial 
method of selection used with pigeons, and he failed 
to allow in his hypothesis for the fact that the suc- 
cess in reaching the mark set in artificial breeding 
was due to an enlargement of the factor of intelli- 


Trib IR MOR WIPE 87 


gent control in the mating. The breeders had 
watched nature, and because nature had an order 
and they sat at her feet and came to her assistance 
they could succeed. Otherwise, their results would 
have turned out so differently each time in repeated 
experiments, if the operations of nature were acci- 
dentally variable, as to be worthless. When natural 
selection was put on a par with artificial selection it 
ceased legitimately and logically to denote a process 
by which certain forms which were left over after 
the intermediate links had dropped out, were acci- 
dentally left over. The right term to use for such 
a process would have been the accidental remnant, 
and this is what Darwin meant to say but does not 
—in the term natural selection. After all the pains 
he took he could not get away from a purposive 
word, although he denied or ignored its purport in 
his description of the process of evolution. Another 
term which did fit better into the conception of evo- 
lution through chance was struggle for existence. 
There is seemingly no element of order, no plan 
apparent in this struggle. But the outcome is the 
place to look in order to determine whether the 
struggle can be called blind and unreasoning. When 
we can look back over a struggle which has finally 
resulted in a wonderful order and inter-relation of 
_ living beings, can that kind of a struggle in the light 
of its end be justly classified as meaningless, or must 
it be called purposive? ‘The terms survival of the 


88 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


fittest and adaptation unquestionably point to an 
aim and end. Unless survival through fitness and 
adjustment mean what they say, and thus affirm 
relationships and not accidental co-existences, they 
are wrongly applied. But if they are true to the 
facts of the process, they characterize that »rocess 
as one which cannot be excluded from a realm of 
order and purpose. 

Let us turn now to the question of the meaning 
of mimicry in nature. “Two kinds of moths, called 
the Anosia and Basilarchia, may serve us as illus- 
trations. The former is avoided by birds because 
it is unpalatable, and the latter, although it is 
palatable, escapes the birds because it looks just like 
the Anosia. “There are many similar cases of pro- 
tective coloration among insects, birds, and wild 
fauna. Could both these species, the original and 
the imitation, spring into being first and then sur- 
vive as the outcome of a long jumble of accidental 
changes, or would they have lost out and disap- 
peared in the struggle? Does not the latter sup- 
position seem far more reasonable than the former? 
How were such wonderful means of protection 
developed? If it is doubtfully reasonable to sup- 
pose that the dovetailing of so many correspond- 
ences are the result of chance, where is this reason 
and purpose which they betray—in impersonal 
nature or beyond nature and above it? It does not 
seem possible in the face of this fact of mimicry to 


THE LIFT OF LIFE 89 


keep on thinking that the evidence of nature is in 
favor of chance. Another parallel case is the corre- 
spondence of the human eye to the eye of the pecten. 
The two lines of development from which these 
two arose separated ages preceding their appearance. 
Why should these two organs be so alike, therefore, 
unless they were designed to function to a certain 
common end? Is it possible on the hypothesis of 
chance to explain occurrences like these and many 
others of a similar nature? Much additional argu- 
ment of the same kind can be drawn from com- 
parative anatomy. Similarity of bony structure 
which is so marked calls upon chance to perform 
miracles which are unthinkable. For it to be pos- 
sible to reconstruct a skeleton from a few bones, 
this whole procedure of the anatomist must rest 
upon a presupposition of adaptive inter-relations 
between them. A jaw of a certain curvature implies 
a cheek bone and a skull of a certain shape. A 
' thigh bone of a certain structure points to a certain 
style of backbone. All of this inferential recon- 
struction of animal carcases from one or two bones 
is possible only upon the basis of an open admission 
of the principle of purposive functioning. 

How shall we account for the presence of instinc- 
tive actions in the animal world? If, for example, 
we take the instinct of sucking in the newly born 
mammal and note the complicated co-action of 
different muscles combined in the drawing motion 


90 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


of the mouth, we find a sharp contrast between it 
and other similar actions which require practice. 
Whence comes it that this necessary and useful action 
is so well adjusted from the start through heredity? 
Is it the result of an ancestral try an try again if 
at first you do not succeed policy? Would genera- 
tions of a hit-or-miss existence continued long 
enough ever produce any of the many instincts 
which are functioning right along in the animal 
world? Success is plainly impossible without an 
irruption of intelligence, even though we adopt trial 
and error as the irregular procedure used in place of 
a system worth the name. Success, when it came, 
came not because it had been hit upon accidentally, 
but because life had the sense or reason to seize it 
and hang on to it for the assistance it could be in 
the struggle for existence. One of the most remark- 
able examples of the resourcefulness of the living in 
contrast to the helplessness of the non-living is the 
case of the Didinium. Here is a little monocellular 
form which looks like a mass of undifferentiated 
jelly. Although this little being has no distinct 
nervous structure and no brain, only the primitive 
irritability of protoplasm, it does not let its enemies 
do as they please with it but shoots out a little dart 
at them and does it like a soldier taking aim. Such 
an instinctive protective action almost makes us 
speak of a mind belonging to micro-organisms. 
Although nothing in the way of a physical brain is 


Le Lat Ore eth E vii 


present, yet such purposive instinctive action takes 
place. Can we study cases like this and not be 
moved to infer a purpose and reason in the universe 
too amazing to be self-made by the beings that 
show it and, therefore, originating elsewhere? 
Surely we are face to face with data that arouse a 
pitch of wonder in us that will send us looking far 
and wide for the intelligence that produced these 
results. 

It is sometimes urged that the arguments of phi- 
losophy for the presence of mind in the world of 
life rest upon garbled testimony. Are there not 
hosts of maladjustments and malformations in the 
world? Are these therefore not purposely neglected 
and only those factors picked out that make for 
order and the data overlooked or slighted that bear 
the earmarks of accident and chance? A fierce storm 
arises and almost a whole species of birds in migra- 
tion is destroyed. How many human beings lose 
their lives annually in accidents of nature or acci- 
dents due to contributory negligence on our human 
part? Pain racks all living forms and death puts 
an end to them. But after we have weighed all of 
these facts that seem the stupid work of chance and 
indifference, are they destructive of the impression 
that the world ‘‘on the whole”’ is a world of order? 
‘They must rather be part of a larger economy than 
we have yet compassed. Individuals may get lost 
in the great household of nature, but does life get 


92 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


lost or will it go on and fulfill its great purpose? 
Pain must be interpreted, not from the point of 
view of human sensitiveness, but from the angle 
of its total meaning as a danger signal for life and 
its development. We can already see how death 
removes the decaying forms and opens up the way 
for other living beings. Except for the passing of 
the preceding generation, the earth would get all 
cluttered up, and the struggle for bare subsistence 
would put all further development out of the ques- 
tion. Man becomes wiser through his mishaps. 
And thus the great economy of life is seen to be on 
the whole an economy of order and purpose. 


SUMMARY 


Our survey of some of the outstanding data of 
life and its development has strengthened our long- 
ing to know, and our expectation of finding out, 
more concerning the intelligent power above and 
beyond life. Our studies have now reached the 
point where we can take the stand that this is a 
reasonable universe, and that the chapters of life 
are stages in the unfoldment of a purposive end and 
the fulfilment of a great aim. 


PART II 
‘THE PROBLEMS OF MIND 





CHAPTER VI 


THE MAKING OF MIND 


FEW years ago Professor J. Harvey Robin- 
son wrote a very suggestive book on the 
“mind in the making.’’ He wrote as a historian 
and endeavored to trace the growth and expansion 
of the mind in the course of human development. 
But prior to the historian the philosopher must 
have his say concerning the make of the mind. His 
problem is how to get at the individual mind in 
man in its generic character first, and then perhaps 
to determine whether there is a social mind. 

Before a history can be written we must have a 
clear idea of the subject to be historically inves- 
tigated. For a long time the mind was identified 
with the phenomena of consciousness. But this 
view of the mind always ran into difficulties in 
explaining memory, both in its moment of recollec- 
tion and its previous period of retention. It was 
especially in connection with the problem of reten- 
tion that the trail led below the threshold of con- 
sciousness. ‘The researches of psychoanalysis also 
lead down into a subconscious mind, even if we 
cannot follow Freud in picturing it as a dungeon of 
sex desires. Awareness alone is a quite partial and 

95 


96 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


not at all a full and sufficient characterization of 
mind. It is its focal center, but mind shades off 
beyond it into fainter and fainter flutters of con- 
sciousness that finally die down and sink below the 
level of the conscious. Some of the students of 
psychic research, following F. W. H. Myers, have 
put in a claim for a supraliminal mind, a mind that 
in its upward reaches crosses the border into the 
mystic, the universal, the supraspatial, and the time- 
less. Certain phenomena occur in telepathy and 
telekinesis that create a similar probability of the 
mind’s power of ascent above, as well as of descent 
below, the workaday consciousness. In view of all 
of this testimony we may call mind the medium of 
the functioning of intelligence, of feeling, and of 
action. It is composite in character, with these 
three marked sides, which may be analyzed and 
treated separately for study purposes but which 
never operate except together. 

In the early stages of biological progress which 
began in the middle of the nineteenth century, the 
effort of the Greek materialists to derive mind from 
matter was renewed. Mind was spoken of as an 
epiphenomenon, an after-effect or by-product or 
echo of matter. But this account of it virtually 
eliminates mind as a separate entity and could not 
hold out very long. Such a qualitative difference 
exists between matter and mind that the derivation 
of mind from matter puts an impossible strain upon 





‘THE MAKING OF MIND 97 


the scientific imagination. Mind does not move 
within space and its laws of thinking cannot be 
subsumed under the laws of matter, even in their 
biological aspect, without doing violence to some 
vital properties of the mind. ‘This position was 
consequently abandoned by the best psychologists. 
There was a plus to the mind which, it was decided, 
could not be derived from the most careful physio- 
logical analysis of the brain. In fact, ‘Thomson’ 
showed that it is the lobes of the brain which are 
shaped by the thought of man rather than that the 
thought is an offshoot of the physiological reactions 
of the gray matter of the brain. The localization 
of certain functions, such as speech, hearing, move- 
ment of the arms, etc., on the switchboard of the 
brain was for convenience and not absolute, for 
when certain sections of the brain were injured 
functions formerly located there received a new 
switchboard number. While every movement of 
the mind times up with action on the part of 
bundles of nerves whose ends are close to each other 
and form what is known as a synapse, yet these 
chemical or electrical motions of the nerves and 
thought are two and not one and the same thing. 
They are accompaniments but have not been proved 
to be causes the one of the other in any real sense of 
causality. 

The abandonment of the hypothesis that the 


* Brain and Personality. 


98 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


mind is an epiphenomenon of matter called for the 
formation of a new theory. “The constant presence 
together of nerve action and mental functioning, 
combined with the apparent impossibility of dis- 
covering any connecting ties, became the basis of a 
theory of their parallelism. “This theory stakes its 
all on its inference that mind and matter move 
simultaneously on paths that run along together 
without touching each other. It virtually ends all 
striving after monism and frankly acknowledges a 
dualistic world. It draws the line between mind 
and matter definitely and assigns to mind a life and 
a peculiar origin of its own. Nevertheless, so close 
a correspondence between the ‘movement of matter 
and the action of the mind puts its champions on 
their mettle to explain how or why the two series 
move so uniformly parallel. It is impossible to 
work out experimentally these parallel movements 
in the brain structure and in the mind. Since it 
demands a correspondence carried to a point of 
detail which cannot be ascertained, the temptation 
often recurs to overemphasize the role played by 
matter and fall back partially upon the hypothesis 
of epiphenomenalism. 

Philosophy in its interpretation of this situation 
is shut up to two alternatives. Parallelism fits in 
well with the doctrine of Leibniz that the harmony 
existing between mind and brain is preéstablished. 
But this piece of pure speculation failed to call to a 





THE MAKING OF MIND he, 


halt the scientific interest which seeks the explana- 
tion of problems within the chain of secondary 
causes without resort to a first cause. Science re- 
torted that this theory simply avoided the difficulty 
and did not grapple with the problem of demon- 
strating the actuality of the parallelism at all. “The 
dualism was accepted but not explained, it was 
abandoned as a subject of scientific investigation by 
this recourse to a religious belief in a creative begin- 
ning. The other alternative, and the one that 
seemed more acceptable, came through the phi- 
losophy of Spinoza, who made thought and ex- 
tension the two humanly found attributes of abso- 
lute substance, which he called God. Thought and 
extension as attributes of the one substance is a 
postulate no more entitled to be classed as scientific 
than the frictionless ether of modern physics. Some 
of his successors were in favor, therefore, of elimi- 
nating Spinoza’s identification of substance with 
God, and making it simply a working postulate like 
that of a frictionless ether. But sooner or later this 
universal is forced to depart from the apparently 
contradictory qualities conferred upon it as a logical 
abstraction, and become one or the other, either 
material or ideal. 

The idealistic solution of this problem frankly 
merges matter and mind and chooses mind as the 
only reality. It reminds us that all our knowledge 
is dependent upon sensation, perception, concep- 


100 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


tion, and reflection. This led, first of all, to the 
Berkeleyian psychological idealism. “Things and 
thoughts are simply two of a kind, and the notion 
that the one are impressions from without and the 
other arise within is a mistake. But the outcome 
of this type of idealism, which denies substance to 
matter while it affirms substance for the mind, is 
the skepticism of Hume. ‘The analysis that reaches 
conclusions which destroy the world without dis- 
solves the world within into a procession of impres- 
sions without an ego to claim their ownership. The 
German logical idealism of Fichte and Hegel avoids 
these pitfalls of skepticism, but it reduces the world 
to a unity which finally becomes impersonal and 
finds the jurisdiction of consciousness confined to 
the human mind. In its English form, as advocated 
by Bradley, the universal is logical non-contradic- 
tion, and in the American form after Royce it is 
interpreted as absolute meaning. None of these 
conjectures gets us anywhere. Idealism in order to 
maintain the all-inclusiveness of mind is simply 
forced to empty the evidence for matter of all con- 
tent and meaning and to sink everything into a 
great abstract unity, which it names the absolute. 
Thus it loses itself in words and in colorless logical 
abstraction and fails to get in touch with the con- 
crete aspects of the mind in its actual functioning. 
It simply accepts mind as reason and builds its 
hypothesis by the use of reason alone, for it really 


THE MAKING OF MIND 101 


disregards both feeling and will in their importance 
and value for the mind as a whole. We must have 
recourse to some other supposition in order to come 
closer to the problem of the making of the mind in 
its concrete and composite nature. An abstract uni- 
versal mind reduced to a mere organ of logical 
process is interesting enough as a speculative struc- 
ture, but it does not serve to interpret the immediate 
realities of the life of the mind usefully. 

The latest modern effort to do this work of inter- 
pretation is in direct opposition to the idealistic 
solution. It takes the position that all there is to 
mind is behavior, eliminates consciousness as a dis- 
tinctive fact, and reduced sensation to nerve-action. 
According to it, qualitatively every thought and 
every reflection is of the same nature as mechanical 
movement. ‘There are several types of behaviorist 
psychology, tapering from the outspoken, consistent 
form given it by Watson down to the mediating 
and weaker forms found in the average, elementary 
college textbook of psychology. “The same argu- 
ments used to overthrow epiphenmonenalism also 
apply in the case of behaviorism. McDougall of 
Harvard has given much attention to the critical 
examination of behaviorism. In observing the 
action of animals from the lowest types upward to 
mammals and to man he discovered that action as 
such does not exist apart from elements of reason 
whereas the whole subject of instinctive mental 


102 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE __ 


functioning is ignored by the behaviorists. Roback 
and Pratt add contributions of their own to these 
arguments. Behaviorism has no adequate explana- 
tion for the higher elements in human thinking. 
The creative thought present in art and literature, 
the inventive genius, the production of myth and 
language in human history, these are all facts which 
a psychology of behavior cannot justly deal with. 
‘The fair success of the modern apparatus for the 
measurement of intelligence has been cited as a proof 
of the contentions of behaviorism. But all that 
measurement discloses is the greater or lesser aptness 
of different minds to remember promptly and to 
reason quickly. It does not present any exhaustive 
evidence as to the nature of the intelligence making 
these responses. “They mean no more than that 
certain questions have been devised to cope with 
limited, practical demands of different sorts. Their 
results form a clue to certain abilities and capacities 
in the functioning of the mind, but not of its whole 
scope and entire make-up. 

A number of other thinkers have reached the 
conclusion that interaction of mind and body is the 
best explanation. When we carefully observe our 
mental experiences we find that bodily conditions 
are more or less closely allied to mental. The whole 
tone of our mind and the color of our consciousness 
is affected by our general bodily condition. We 
may struggle against this intrusion of the bodily 


THE MAKING OF MIND 103 


constitution into our mental frame, but it cannot be 
kept out. Elation or depression of mind keep step 
with the weaker or stronger pressure exerted by 
bodily health or sickness. Our temperaments are 
not solely mentally determined; they also have a 
bodily foundation. The dispositions have their 
instinctive bodily counterparts. All sensations be- 
gin physiologically. We cannot fully understand 
sight, hearing, taste, touch, without first under- 
standing the nervous structure of the different 
senses. 

On the other hand, our bodies can be directly 
affected through our minds. ‘The theory of Lange 
and James that we weep first and then become sorry 
does not stand the test of observation. The evi- 
dence shows rather that we feel sorry and then 
weep. We may laugh because we have been tickled, 
but we also laugh because our risibilities are affected 
by a bit of humor or wit. Thinking may intensify 
a bodily pain or decrease it. Mental attitude can- 
not change us organically, but it can and does 
change the characteristics of our nervous function- 
ing. A state of determination and concentration in 
the mind reverberates through our whole body. A 
good joyous spirit is an aid to health. A sour dis- 
position hinders digestion. After all of these facts 
have been evaluated it seems safe to assert that the 
mind acts downward upon the body and the body 
acts upward upon the mind. But all that we know 


104 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


is a succession or simultaneity of phenomena. It 
is impossible to trace a definite causal connection. 
The support of any causal hypothesis of the rela- 
tion of body and mind is very precarious, for it 
infers more from the observations and psycholog- 
ical experiments than is justified. Interaction can 
be affirmed as a statement of fact but cannot become 
an established logical, causal theory. 

All the different conjectures thus far noted as to 
the origin and constitution of the mind have not 
led us to any fully satisfactory position. Mind still 
remains unique. If we pass now from the hypoth- 
eses of science to the speculations of religion we 
may infer that the source of mind is a more than 
human mind. After a way has been argued up to 
the first cause we can find some rest in assuming 
that this superior executive intelligence is the foun- 
tainhead of our own. As we take our whole mind 
into consideration, with its feelings, emotions, pas- 
sions, determinations, and volitions, the problem 
arises whether we are not justified in going beyond 
the tracing of immediate connections and ascribing 
to the first cause the human qualities of intelligence, 
purpose, and executive capacity, without reducing 
that first cause to the human level. Is this specula- 
tion through analogy to be rejected on the score 
that its anthropomorphism is too extreme, or is it 
also a justifiable inference from the indications of 
reason and power in the submental spheres of exist- 


THE MAKING OF MIND 105 


ence? ‘There seems to bea real relation too between 
the feelings and emotions and the whole problem 
of the objectivity of the beautiful in the universe. 
Light is thrown on the meaning of the will and its 
isolation ended, if we find a connecting link between 
its Originative quality in man and the energy of the 
universe. If the human will cannot be classified as 
one more exhibit of mere unintelligent energy, it is 
speculatively not wrong to assume a will back of 
the energy present in the environment, and this 
assumption can be made without sinking the effect 
in the cause. But this whole business of the tracing 
of the human mind to an ultimate possible source 
affords no explanation of its development from 
infancy to old age. ‘The speculative problem of the 
origin of the mind must not obscure the worth of 
the observations harvested from the growth of the 
mind in time. 

When we begin the study of the first appearances 
of mind in childhood we must reckon with a set of 
inherited tendencies. “There are human tendencies 
common to us all arising from instincts, e.g. self- 
preservation, acquisitiveness, combativeness, etc. 
Different temperamental qualities are combined 
with these. “Then within families there are certain 
inherited tracts and aptitudes of mind which gradu- 
ally show their mettle. From this outfit through 
experience and contact with the customs of society 
certain ideas and habits develop. Our dispositions 


106 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


are modified and our wills are directed. Our feel- 
ings and emotions are cultivated and our passions 
become subject to control and are limited. “Thus 
the growth of mind proceeds from the early gather- 
ing of impressions, through the period of constant 
questions, the age of fancies and fairies, the period 
of dreams and the storm and stress of adolescence, 
up to the maturing of feelings, emotions, and 
actions of middle life and the end in the fixed, 
calmer, quieter atmosphere of ripe old age. Our 
intellect grows from the kindergarten learning of 
objects, a few colors and figures, to the finding of 
our ego, from personalizations, into the ever-fuller 
appreciation of reasoned truth. “This whole process 
has now been carefully observed and a wealth of 
facts gathered by the child psychologists, the stu- 
dents of adolescence and the fully matured mind. 
And furthermore, the confessions of great minds 
set down in their biographies and autobiographies 
and the conjectures and psychological analyses of 
novelists all give us abundant material from which 
to trace the expansion of the mind. 

But in the course of this task the question arises 
whether the story of the individual mind can be 
rightly told without taking the social mind into 
consideration. At first we are inclined to reject the 
existence of a social mind out of hand because we 
are so accustomed to think of mind only in connec- 
tion with individual bodies and as functioning 


THE MAKING OF MIND 107 


through the brains of individuals. “There are think- 
ers who hold that the social mind is a fiction. But 
if we give due weight to the fact that there exist 
common opinions, ideas, truths, common attitudes, 
common feelings and actions, common determina- 
tions and volitions, we shall not be so quick to dis- 
miss a social mind from our calculations. Are these 
common mental phenomena simply a sum in addi- 
tion of fragments from indiviudal minds, or are 
they social attitudes in individual minds? Certainly 
a great part of our education consists in training to 
fill an individual niche in the life of various groups. 
We inherit traditions of a past society, its history 
and culture. A constant infiltration of social think- 
ing goes on in our lives. “The mind of society is 
often moved by great emotions as exhibited not 
only in the mob-feeling of the crowd, but also in 
great common sentiments like those of home, coun- 
try, and religion. We cannot deny that social cur- 
rent affects us profoundly. Individual leadership 
may give a fresh set to the common mind, but only 
as it gets the upper hand of the social directions of 
thinking, feeling, and willing among men. New 
ideas originate with individuals, but they must be- 
come socialized in order to live and thrive. “The 
great social forms of family, church, and _ state 
would be impossible of continuance without a social 
mind. And there are other social contacts which 
equally presuppose a social psychology. 


108 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE | 


SUMMARY 


A study of the mind leads the way to much addi- 
tional evidence of the presence of reason in the 
universe. Energy, moreover, appears no longer as 
blind, heedless energy. ‘here arise the new prob- 
lems involved in pairing together intelligence and 
will. Still another new factor of a distinctive kind 
is the acquaintance formed with feeling and 
emotion, although traces of them had already ap- 
peared in the animal world. Do not all this fresh 
data stimulate us to branch out in our speculations 
beyond the human mind, individual and social, in 
search of some great over-mind which includes in 
its embrace all and more than the highest intelli- 
gence seen by us to be present in nature, man and 
society? We cannot rest caged within the limits 
of the observer; the human mind insists upon for- 
mulating some kind of an answer to the question 
whence it finally came. 


CHAPGERIVIT 


THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY 


HE study of the mind and its development 

necessarily brings us face to face with the prob- 
lem of personality. It would be difficult, if not 
impossible, to discuss the mind and stop short of 
dealing with the question: What is human person- 
ality? “The common understanding of the term 
personality identifies it with the self or with indi- 
viduality. The current definition of personality 
makes it consist in the unity of self-consciousness 
and self-determination. “The error connected with 
this position lies in the stress which it lays on the 
self and its implication that personality is one and 
the same as the ego naturally given to man. But 
if we pause to reconsider only a moment we shall 
be led to see that this identification of personality 
and individuality will not withstand closer inves- 
tigation and analysis. [here is a very distinct 
character to the self and to individuality. 

By its very nature the individual or self is the 
centered ego with its own character and life. “There 
is no such closed circuit denoted by the idea of per- 
sonality. In fact, personality implies overtures 
toward others and contacts beyond the self. Indi- 

109 


110 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


viduality is a matter of easy observation, for indi- 
viduation is present in all nature. We have become 
so accustomed to note the generic qualities in things 
and to think only of the type that we fail to observe 
many individual qualities that form part of the 
concrete reality of objects. A generic classification 
based on the different geometrical forms found in 
the different minerals is part and parcel of miner- 
alogy. But frequently specimens are found which 
are not absolutely correct copies of the pattern of 
crystallization set for them. One piece of rock 
differs in pattern of crystallization from another 
piece of the same rock; there are variations observ- 
able from the prescribed design. In plant life, there 
is an individuated difference between plant and 
plant within a species. While this is more evident 
the higher the order, yet it is observable also in the 
lowest types. “The species of rose named Marechal 
Neill does not allow for the differences between 
individual roses on the same Marechal Neill rose 
bush. The principle of individuation becomes 
more marked and prominent in the animal world. 
It is pronounced enough especially in the higher 
mammals for us to see that one deer differs in many 
slight respects from another. In man’s case the prin- 
ciple of individuation is given even more extended 
scope. 

The traits individual to any man are more 
marked than his family or racial qualities. This 


ribo ROBEBM.OPIPERSONALUDY) © Lt 





fact of individuality which is concrete and real, 
must be reckoned with. Even two persons with 
the same home, the same surroundings, and the same 
ancestry in the same country are not just alike. 
‘Two persons may try to say and do the same thing, 
but it is never exactly the same. Differences in our 
bodily appearance are present in larger variety, and 
the same statement holds for our mental life. Indi- 
viduality is therefore a concrete fact which is easily 
verifiable. But a step of inference then takes us to 
a metaphysical entity back of individuality or the 
self in man. ‘This speculative assumption seems 
justified once the mind is acknowledged to be 
unique. In any hypothesis that the world and man 
are devoid of real mentality there can be no place 
for a real metaphysical ego or self. But since, as 
has been shown, we cannot reduce the mind to a 
form or function of matter, it is allowable to argue 
for the existence of an actual unity in man, of 
which the course of nature below him seems 
prophetic. ‘This unity reports itself in the con- 
sciousness of self as we reflect upon ourselves. While 
David Hume could not find within himself any- 
thing but fleeting impressions and ideas, most of us 
are aware of a self and do not stop with mere 
thoughts, feelings, and volitions, but go on to a 
thinker, a feeler, and a willer. We find difficulty 
in getting rid of our acquaintance with this ego. 
‘The psychologist may be content to note phe- 


Li2sONTT YOR SPAT HGAINID KNOWLEDGE 


nomena only, and be able to put his finger on, as 
James said, merely a warm feeling that is named 
self. But the philosopher must go further and 
draw his inferences on the basis of the self-feelings, 
and reach the conclusion that these self-feelings are 
signposts of an actual, really existent, though mys- 
terious, self or ego. 

Personality, on the other hand, is the result 
created by our mental life as it develops. The 
foundations of personality are laid by our deter- 
minings. An organizing power over our own being 
inheres in the choices and selections which we deter- 
mine to accept and follow. The lines of direction 
which our determinations begin to take become 
fixed into habits. We make our character through 
acts of judgment and will. When confronted with 
two or several possibilities of choice, that one is 
apt to be selected which past determinations have 
tended to make dominant. In the beginning, our 
determinings of course follow either the direction 
of others, customs and ideas of society and accepted 
traditional attitudes, and only gradually do we hew 
out a new path for ourselves. Whether we begin a 
new course of action or repeat old ones, personality 
is constantly forming and character is in the making. 

Let us consider some instances. I have been 
taught to be economical and past experiences have 
shown me to be careful in my expenditures. I am 
now confronted, we will say, by an appeal to give 





THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY _ 113 


generously to an endowment campaign of my Alma 
Mater. ‘The chances are that I shall refuse or give 
very little unless there is another line of choices in 
my life in certain directions of liberality that is 
more than a match for this trait of economy. The 
final trend of my action is likely to be in the direc- 
tion rendered strongest in me through past deter- 
minations. But a new course may even be taken 
that flies in the face of the past if a sufficient, strong, 
new motive is aroused in me. Such a sharp break 
with the past is required to get a movement started 
for the abolition of slavery, or the evils of strong 
drink, individual and social. It is in this analysis 
of men in respect to how determinations are likely 
to continue along fixed lines or can be induced to 
strike out into new paths that we see the making of 
personality. Creative work upon our personalities 
is always going on within us, for we cannot escape 
the reflex influence of our self-determinations. ‘The 
organized unified result is what we ought to call 
personality in distinction from individuality. Per- 
sonality is the result created by our choices and 
actions; individuality is the ego with its peculiarities 
and separate qualities given us to start with. 

A remarkable confirmation of this doctrine that 
our personalities are in the making and are not fixed 
at the start is provided by the psychological analysis 
of the alterations of personality. Cases are on 
record where a single personality has split up into 


114 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


several, which then alternate with one another in 
the saddle. “The most famous early case is that of 
the French girl known as Léonie.* She alternated 
between five distinct personalities from time to 
time, and they each showed separate distinctive 
directions and attitudes. Dr. Prince has reported 
on several modern instances where there was only 
the change from one personality to a second. These 
instances of abnormality have always created difh- 
culty for the champions of a fixed personality. 
They make it plain that experiences may gather 
around a new center. ‘The diversities in the differ- 
ent sets of choices show that more than one style of 
personality is possible to the same ego. ‘The denial 
that creative work is always being done upon our 
personality shifts the problem raised by a person- 
ality that splits up, as the term shows, back to the 
self. If it is possbile to turn a divided personality 
into a single consistent one—and this does not deny 
the metaphysical ego—then it is clear that the ab- 
normal making of several personalities from a single 
original does not destroy the metaphysical ego. If 
we disbelieve in the making of personality we must 
ascribe the abnormality of multiple personality to 
a destruction of the self. 

The psychological method which seeks to correct 
abnormalities of personality through fusing the 
various differing component personalities into one 


* James, Psychology, I, pp. 207, 387 ff. 





THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY 115 


can be justified only on the assumption that per- 
sonality is the product of our choices. The original 
ego is the material given us to start with and our 
personalities are what we make of it in and through 
our experiences. It is the given spiritual raw mate- 
rial that we shape into personality. We take our 
inherited selves and shape them into more grown-up 
editions of themselves. 

In the work of organizing personality, we dare 
not omit the concurrence of other factors with our 
choices and determinations. As our growth in per- 
sonality proceeds, a great influence is exercised upon 
our progress by our mental attitudes. Our intelli- 
gence is by no means to be excluded from the 
process. We either accept from the past or devise 
for ourselves a supply of ideals to draw us on and 
also control our thoughts about ourselves. The 
organizing work of volition follows a plan formed 
in our mind. We may not always definitely recog- 
nize an intellectual element as present in our deter- 
minations, but it is always there. When I argue 
with myself whether I shall choose as my vocation 
one of the professions, certain facts and problems 
have to be taken into consideration. Usually men 
do not make blind choices or follow haphazardly 
the drift of circumstances. The intellect takes a 
more or less prominent part in our decisions. Per- 
sonality is not the work of mere will apart from 
our reason and intellect. While at times men over- 


116 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


stress the part which the intellect plays, yet more 
frequently they undervalue its place. Choices which 
are made with the intellect functioning at its mini- 
mum are not apt to lead to the best personality. 
And yet reason is not the only confederate required 
to lead us to creative decision and action. 

The third element that must enter into the mak- 
ing of personality is feeling in the wide sense inclu- 
sive of emotions and sentiments. Our whole being 
is drawn into action in the process of arriving at a 
real development of personality. Feelings, senti- 
ments, and emotions supply the drive in the forma- 
tion of the character that expresses personality. A 
mere cold calculation of intellect, be it ever so 
accurate, has no power to translate itself into a 
creative result. “The will must have back of it, at 
all times, the urge of feeling. In a certain sense will 
is feeling put into action. While careful analysis 
must distinguish between will and feeling, never- 
theless there is a greater unity in quality between 
them than between either of them and the intellect. 
Our mind is a total unit and in this unit feeling 
plays a large part. It is our most intimate charac- 
teristic. Feeling imparts to our choices their dis- 
tinctive quality and color. Feeling is not only the 
urge added to the active tug of our volitions: it is 
that which intensifies the whole process and brings 
it close home to us. Our intellections are made 
forceful by it and glory and beauty are added to our 





THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY ie 


ideals. On the other hand, it may also degenerate 
into mere passion and degrade us and turn us aside 
from our real development. A power for good 
though it be, if abused, it becomes a power for evil. 
Its drive may turn into an onrush that disregards 
the clear insight of reason. It is necessary, there- 
fore, to keep the essential force of feeling rightly 
balanced and under good control. We dare not let 
it hurry us into base action, but we must give in to 
it whole-heartedly when the intellect has shown the 
clear and right way. 

An important factor in the understanding of per- 
sonality is the major part played by its relations 
toward others. While manhood is expanding for 
it, the growth so obtained is not secured by a policy 
of selfish isolation. Contacts with others are real 
factors in the making of true personality. ‘There is 
a busy Bureau of Foreign Affairs connected with its 
developing life. A growing personality impinges 
upon the lives of others and in return is played upon 
by them. It is never content to remain within 
itself. Personality is not identical with self-culture. 
To the degree that Goethe heartlessly laid all life 
under tribute for his own aggrandizement he was 
murdering his own best possibilities. Personality 
of really high quality lives not for itself nor within 
itself. “The culture of the self is a reflex result of 
wide and unselfish contacts with life. In the whole- 
sale commerce of many relations lie the great chances 


118 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


of development for personality. As we lose our 
lives of self we gain them again in a personality 
that mirrors all life and the whole world. The 
functioning of personality, if it were only the func- 
tioning of a static self, would be limited, but as it 
is the enlargement of the capacities of a self grow- 
ing through its increasing contacts with its sur- 
roundings it has endless possibilities. In it and in 
its implications we may find the right approach to 
the synthetic unity which shall best solve the prob- 
lems of science, art, and history—and, in short, 
envisage all the interests and possibilities of life. 


SUMMARY 


In personality we have found a trail which leads 
us further than biology into the scope of the whole 
mind. We find a unity with capacities for develop- 
ment in our self and out of it that point far beyond 
us. [here is a prophecy of eternity in the prospect 
of its endless growth, which leads us almost into the 
presence of the Deity, in whom what is growth for 
us is infinite attainment. Does not the path it takes 
point not below but above itself? 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE SPHERE OF SOCIETY 


N the view just taken of the problem of per- 
sonality the question: What is society and its 
relation to personality? cannot be set aside. “The 
very fact that personality is so widely hospitable in 
its relations with others should make us eager to 
investigate the structure and functions of society. 
Society may be defined as men in their together- 
ness. Sociology studies men in their various kinds 
of group relations. Are these relations mere by- 
products of individual existence or do they exist in 
their own separate right? “The day has long passed 
since Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s assertion that man in 
a state of nature is a rampant individualist with a 
chip on his shoulder received any serious attention, 
except as an episode in the history of thought. We 
do not now believe that primeval men met together 
in an assembly to form society and established a 
social contract to end the state of war of every man 
against his neighbor. ‘The eighteenth-century con- 
ception of man, which looked upon him solely as 
an individualist and regarded all his social forms as 
acquired characteristics, has given place to the 
notion of man as primarily a social being. This is 
hig 


fo ere DT SPE PET REESE SY LOS PEERS SSE VSS A AES PES SEED I EERSTE RI SETS BESET TEE TERT ARPS GET ES ST SATION SRT SR SSS 
120 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


a return to the position of Aristotle, who called man 
a political animal. His social capacity is supposed 
to be asold asman. Apparently there never was a 
time when the race of men lived a hermit life. 

The speculation most favored at present claims 
that man began social life in a low tribal state. His 
condition then is supposed to have been on a level 
but little above the life of an animal group. “There 
is no direct evidence that this was the case; n- clear 
basis of fact. Its main dependence is upon the sup- 
position of an unbroken evolution; it is the out- 
come of a hypothesis that leans upon biological 
rather than upon historical evidence. It also holds 
that the present wild tribes are cases of arrested 
development of this low origin, and that what is 
found among them is a reproduction of primitive 
conditions. ‘There is no real weight given to the 
possibility of degeneration, although instances of 
such a process can be found among groups national 
in size within historical times. ‘The belief that the 
lower tribes are remnants and not reversals has be- 
come common, backed as it is by the conquest which 
the prevailing conception of evolution has made 
since the middle of the nineteenth century. This 
hypothesis does not rest upon unmistakable evi- 
dence, but is one more among many other examples 
of the tendency in the saddle to unify everything 
under the ruling hypothesis of the day. It is there- 


_ THE SPHERE OF SOCIETY 121 


fore purely speculative in character and owes its 
vogue to the trend of, thought dominant for the 
moment, which desires a monistic simplification of 
the world that shall be consistent with the widely 
accepted standpoint that society as well as nature 
moves along an upward path. ‘There is no evidence 
against the existence of the family from the begin- 
ning. No proof has been unearthed for promiscuity 
among primitive tribes. “The family may still be 
soundly assumed to be the original unit and the 
source of the growth of society as it passes from the 
smallest of groups through the patriarchal stage to 
the tribal form. Tribes finally combine, through 
a fusion of language, custom, tradition, and religion 
to form nations. Gradually, in the nation, differ- 
ent strains of tribal blood commingle in a common 
stock. 

However we settle the problem of the source of 
society, the question remains, What are the forces 
active in its development? Leslie Stephen com- 
pares society to a living organism. He discusses its 
tissue and the good and bad hygiene at the bottom 
of its health or sickness. “The point of view of this 
school is altogether physical and biological. No 
one doubts that physical and biological factors play 
a large part in complex social as in the relatively 
more simple individual life. But when every pos- 
sible allowance is made for them, does it follow that 
the nature and progress of society have been fully 


122 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


explained? Are social connections subject to no 
other laws than those of biology? No sociologist 
is willing today to commit himself to this hypothe- 
sis, although some of them still overemphasize cer- 
tain analogies between animal and human groups. 

In contrast to the biological sociologist, others 
have taken the attitude that environmental forces 
are responsible for the make-up of any given society. 
The first outstanding advocate of this position was 
Buckle, in his History of Civilization. Sharply 
differing from the idealistic view taken by Guizot 
in his work bearing the same title, Buckle attempted 
to show how materially the climate, soil, and other 
natural features of a country affect a people and 
determine the character of their ideals, outlook, 
culture, and even religion. Simon Patten, one of 
the followers of Buckle, endeavored to demonstrate 
that the key to the English thought of the nine- 
teenth century could be found in the Corn Laws. 
That sort of reasoning is likely to end up with a 
society, which is the manufactured product of 
mechanical forces. Fatalism as a theory of the 
destiny of the individual has sometimes become 
social fatalism or necessitarianism. This whole 
speculation concerning the forces responsible for 
the making of society stands and falls with the 
proof offered that the individual is made by such 
forces. If this can be shown to be impossible, it 





(PH SPHERE: OROSOCIR TY, 123 


will be equally impossible fully to explain society 
on the naturalistic or mechanistic basis. 

Another tendency at present is to slight the indi- 
vidual too much as compared with the importance 
given to the social complex. The oscillation of the 
pendulum to individualism, still so evident in the 
Declaration of Independence, has swung to the 
other extreme. ‘There are sociologists who do not 
class the individual with his characteristics and 
rights, on a par with society, but sink him out of 
sight in society. “There are many facts of heredity 
and environment that can be cited in support of this 
position. Traditions in which men grow up, social 
customs and habits, family demands, consciousness 
of class, national sentiments, racial feeling—all of 
these seem to make man in their image and sub- 
merge him as an individual. And yet man has it 
in his power to turn heredity into better channels 
through ideals and aspirations, and change his 
environment for the better. He has a fighting 
chance to overcome or limit the influences of family, 
class, nation, and race. We must not lay everything 
to environment and make man a blind victim of 
social conditions and forces. 

There are three main social institutions in all 
history, the family, the state, and the church. No 
other group forms are so constant and universal. In 
the case of the family either polygamy, many wives 
to one man, or polyandry, many men to one wife, 


124 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


was its early form. But out of these early experi- 
ments monogamy gradually won its place as the 
best form of family. “Today a very serious problem 
confronts the family as a social institution. It 
seems to be disintegrating, especially in the United 
States, through the enormous and constant increase 
of divorce. Many features of present life are preju- 
dicial to it in industry and commercialized pleas- 
ure. Is society bent on unmaking itself and de- 
stroying its earliest and most fundamental form? 
This is the one of the most pressing practical prob- 
lems before society today. Its parallel is the youth 
movement intent on abrogating many of the cus- 
tomary relations of the younger people to the older, 
which in the past had their foundation in the 
family. 

The problem of the state is the problem of ways 
and means of satisfying the increasing demands of 
democracy. “The world over old forms of govern- 
ment and ancient traditions that rested either upon 
monarchy or aristocracy are crumbling. Where will 
it all end? ‘The large hand which the individual 
demands that the state shall let him play in his 
own life seems to threaten a state of anarchy. Then, 
too, majority rule, often of many not fit, is making 
the state very unstable. But alongside of these 
inroads upon the state—the inroads of extreme 
democracy—is the increasing tide of socialization. 
The very same group that wants more leeway for 


THE SPHERE OF SOCIETY 125 





itself from the state is demanding that the state 
ought to take over the control of more of life. 
While this demand is made in the interest of special 
classes and groups, the whole population would be 
affected. Perhaps this inconsistent mixture of indi- 
vidualism and socialization through the state will 
peter out because of its inherent contradictions. But 
the question is a serious one, Whither is the state 
being hurried along by the great unthinking 
multitude? 

The church, or religion in its social form that 
has existed everywhere in all history, exhibits to 
the world the contradictory agencies of high control 
and extreme private judgment by the many. There 
is a strong tendency manifest everywhere to press 
tolerance to the utmost and to work for a unity of 
faiths, with an utter disregard of past creed, cult, 
and conduct. ‘This is the work of sentiment and 
feeling, but many afterward endeavor to justify it 
through argument. Shall there be unification of 
a kind which almost identifies religion with 
humanity? There is a changing order coming on, 
but whether it will be better or worse than the 
present no one knows. Great masses of our people, 
young and old, are beyond the pale of any type of 
religious organization. 

‘There are many other social contacts open to men 
in addition to the three prominent social forms, 
family, state, and church. “They may associate in 


126 UNITY iIOFR/ PAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 





the interest of science and art, of charity and phi- 
lanthropy, of political advancement or of social 
reform, and many like concerns. But the most per- 
plexing social complex is that created by the neces- 
sity of making a living. “The problems of com- 
merce and industry, the relations of employer and 
employee, the adjustment of capital and labor— 
these are the questions that bulk large in society 
today. The attitude of men toward each other in 
business is frequently not such as to further the 
well-being of society. There is a competition 
which does not stop at ruthlessness. ‘The relations 
between men within the same trade or profession 
are often not conducive to their common well- 
beings. The broad, general contacts between labor 
and capital are not always based upon mutual trust, 
confidence, and fairness, but are ruled by the tactics 
of conflict and war. Sociology thus far has failed 
to supply adequate protection against these dangers 
in the life of society. The economic conflict 
has crossed over into the political domain, and 
blocs are formed and lobbies maintained which seek 
the selfish advantage of certain groups regardless of 
whether these demands are just and socially con- 
structive. What is lacking is a correct fundamental 
conception of the inner workings of society which 
would make it plain that no advantages that injure 
the total life of men in society ever turn out to be 
a real gain to the parties immediately concerned. 





_.THE SPHERE OF SOCIETY 127 


It is interesting, for instance, to note how a group 
fighting for an increase of wages fails to consider 
that rises in prices keep lock-step with rises in wages. 
In consequence, the recoil of the rise of prices 
actually discounts, for the group which obtains an 
increased wage, the advantage of the increase. Agi- 
tators do not give people a fair view because they 
do not tell them the whole story of the actual oper- 
ation of certain courses of action in society. The 
great need is clearer ideas of the inevitable conse- 
quences flowing from inner relationships of the 
social complex that are not apparent on the surface. 

The final word in regard to the problems of 
society does not lie in the direction of accepting 
existing conditions as the result of forces which 
society cannot control. ‘There must be proper 
realization of the fact of kinship out of which grow 
many connections. But kinship by itself is no 
explanation of the making of society. Doing the 
work of the world binds men together. But this 
interest also gets us no nearer the real basis of 
society. Sociologists have come to recognize that 
the work of integration in society is really the work 
of psychical factors. Some of them hold that folk- 
ways, certain socially inherited group ways of 
thinking, feeling, and acting, condition all life. It 
cannot be denied that the feelings and sentiments 
with the related ideas and volitions associated with > 
social traditions are powerful. But is the social 


————————— eee - k . = = 
128 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


fabric solely what these inheritances make it, or can 
a creative upbuilding of society be obtained from 
fresh psychic functionings of this kind? 

After going the round of the alternatives, the 
conclusion is hard to escape that the integration of 
society comes about through the growth of per- 
sonality as its core. “The objection is sometimes 
raised that there is no personality in, or of, or to, 
the social complex. This objection rests upon the 
erroneous identification of individuality and per- 
sonality, which was discussed above. Since we 
there discovered a basis of discrimination between 
them, however, we are not debarred from applying 
the term personality to certain social facts. Nor 
does it follow that such an application necessarily 
leads us into the logical idealism of Hegel. We do 
not mean unduly to objectify society and amal- 
gamate it with abstract spirit, but the fact remains 
that certain functionings are observable in society 
that are like the processes by which personality is 
built up in the individual. “They are as follows: 

First, common actions take place in all social 
forms that are not a sum in addition of mere indi- 
vidual volitions. In the family that has a real 
family life, working and acting together goes on in 
the interest of the family. The state has its group 
problems and state determinations and sets itself to 
perform acts that are truly collective and psycho- 
logically constructive. Such state acts even in rep- 





roe eRe OFF SOCIETY 129 


resentative government are not the sum of indi- 
vidual desires and purposes. To the degree that 
they become individualized they cease to be real 
state action, action of a common nature and import. 
The church engages in common tasks and carries 
them on asa social whole. It reaches decisions that 
are not individual but common determinations. 
This same psychological fact is characteristic of all 
forms of association, of societies of every type 
formed for business, philanthropy, or pleasure. No 
one can fail to observe some of these composite 
determinations and actions. 

Secondly, society, as well as the individual, has 
its ideas and thoughts. ‘These socially shared ideas 
have back of them traditions, a history, and a civi- 
lization. But as intellectual elements they play a 
kindred part in organized actions and composite 
determinations to that played’ by them in the de- 
cisions and conduct of the individual. Each family 
has its past, its story of its ancestors, and its aspira- 
tions of kinship and family character. ‘The state 
is bound in its actions even more than is the family 
by the ideals upon which it rests and the course of 
its intellectual past. We cannot understand any 
vital decision and action of the state apart from the 
past workings of its form of government and all 
the conceptions which have gone into its making. 
The church does not reconstitute itself anew in 
every act, but its history and its creed, whether ex- 


130 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 





pressed or implied, enter into the business of form- 
ing its present decisions. Men today, in their efforts 
to unify churches, realize more and more that mere 
co6peration in life and work is not enough and 
must ultimately lead to the question of a common 
platform of faith. Ideas play an equivalent part in 
the determinations of other social bodies in regard 
to their actions. Nowhere can we find an absence 
of the element of intellect. 

Thirdly, the last element in the psychological 
functioning of society is the element of feeling or 
emotion. All social life is shot through with great 
sentiments that rest upon feelings and emotions. 
The family as the institution par excellence of affec- 
tion is most deeply moved by feeling and emotion. 
The relation of parents to children, of children to 
parents, of man to wife and wife to man, are 
founded upon great affective currents of life. The 
state must become idealized in the national mind in 
order to maintain patriotism at full strength; its 
leaders must not be regarded only from the angle 
of a cold, critical examination. The idealization 
of the state is a matter of sentiment. “The appeal 
of the state to men is not unemotional nor are its 
acts. “The church, as the fostering guardian of the 
religious attitude, can never escape from the meshes 
of feeling and emotion. As great as is the part that 
emotion plays in all religion, so great should be the 
share that emotion plays in the life of the church. 


PhD Sen oREOrP SOCIETY 131 


Other social contacts also produce and are charac- 
terized by the presence of great feelings of attach- 
ment and of loyalty. Business men and laboring 
men look upon their trade groups with special 
warmth of feeling and cling to certain sentiments 
through the functioning of the social emotion of 
their group. No social complex is free from this 
factor. 

The presence and active functioning of these 
three elements in society justify the claim that the 
basis of society is also personality. Out of common 
acts, ideas, and feelings all social forms build up a 
unitary existence. [his unitary existence, consti- 
tutionally speaking, we call personality. We draw 
no metaphysical inference in regard to society from 
this fact. Nevertheless, on it rests the welfare of 
society, and the more men realize this and accept 
the upbuilding of personality to which full par- 
ticipation in the various forms of social life will 
lead them, the more society will find its goal. 


SUMMARY 


The elements of personality in the social life 
strengthen the indications of its ultimate importance 
implied in individual personality. It looks beyond 
its own life for its creative development. Perhaps, 
indeed, society points to a social God after whom 
the whole family on earth and heaven is named. Is 


132 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


there not society in God?t Does God fulfil in 
infinite completion all the promise contained in per- 
sonality as it is being shaped now and here? Does 
He reciprocate as the mind of society tends toward 
Him and furnish its highest impetus to it? These 
are questions which religion must answer. If it 
can reply adequately, then it is just to assume that 
the growth of society into personality calls for God 
in explanation. 

* Fairbain, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, p. 
394, well says, following Augustine: ‘‘God is love; but love 
is social, can as little live in solitude as man can breathe in a 
vacuum. In order to its being there must be a subject bestow- 
ing love, and an object, rejoicing in the bestowment; without 
the active forthgoing and the passive reflection and the return 


it could not be, for absolute and simple loneliness of being 
would be a state of complete lovelessness,”’ 


CHAPTER IX 


THE LEAD OF LANGUAGE 


MONG the various products of society none is 
more fundamental to its existence and con- 
tinuance than language. Any philosophical consid- 
eration of society as a psychological datum cannot 
overlook the production of language. Expression 
is a necessity of the mind, both on the part of society 
and of the individual. But the individual would 
not use language unless the impulse to the expres- 
sion of mind in language was brought about 
through the need of communication. There have 
been thinkers who have endeavored to sever mind 
and language. ‘They tell us that thought does not 
have to have a body of language to give it shape 
and form. But in our actual concrete experience 
we cannot well disconnect language from thought. 
No matter what the sound or language-sign, it im- 
plies that something is seeking to be said. Every- 
thing that thus gets communicated derives its force 
and meaning from the thought or feeling or volition 
behind it, i.e. its inner value. We cannot really 
understand language unless we study the mind using 
it. Apart from the mind language would be idle 
sound and fury. The urge to communicate that 
133 





134 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE _ 


originated language among men, and the function- 
ings of language in society and through individuals, 
are among the most necessary preliminaries to the 
understanding and evaluation of language. We 
must know how language is born to understand 
whither it leads. 

One of the most interesting studies is to observe 
how the office of communication gets performed in 
the animal world prior to human language.’ Signs 
with definite meanings are in use in the life of such 
remarkable groups as ants and bees. The only 
question is whether their close social life is the result 
of social instinct guiding each individual along the 
road that leads to the community interest, or 
whether it is due to some very primitive form of 
contact and communication. The latter seems pres- 
ent, even if we give full value to the former. As 
we rise in the scale, before there is any communi- 
cation through sounds, cries, and songs, silent signs 
are in use that convey messages of fear or danger, 


* “Language has had an interesting history. To begin with, 
among animals, the use of the voice was to utter a sex call. 
That is the only use in Amphibians. Among reptiles it 
broadens a little; the young crocodile pipes to its mother, the 
snake’s hiss is a danger signal. Among birds the use of the 
voice as a means of expressing and exciting love rises to a 
climax, but there is often a call from parent to offspring and 
from offspring to parent, there are danger signals, and there 
are sometimes half a dozen or more sounds. In Mammals the 
voice becomes even more dissociated from sex, and even more 
a 48) instrument.’ (J. Arthur Thomson, What Is Man? 
p. 48. 





TTHE LEAD OF LANGUAGE 135. 


hunger or love. Language itself, so argue some 
thinkers, is the result of these gestures. There is 
much of symbol in language in spoken and written 
form. Prior to any logical relation of subject and 
predicate, communication is conveyed by signs of 
feeling or calls to action. It is not necessary to wait 
for the rise and development of the concept to have 
some form of communication. ‘The justification of 
this explanation of language rests upon testimony 
as to the sounds in use among the animals below 
man. ‘There are herds or societies of fairly intelli- 
gent animals, like wolves, monkeys, horses, cranes 
and parrots, which are in touch with each other and 
maintain community contacts. A variety of de- 
mands for protection or for food are conveyed up 
and down the line, through significant sounds. 
Where there are only pairs or small groups, sounds 
as signs are equally in evidence. ‘The lion roars in 
hunger or danger. The coyote sends forth its call 
for aid to its mate in getting prey. The thrush 
sings its mellifluous love song to its chosen com- 
panion. The varying and beautiful trills of the 
lark, the nightingale, and other songsters, the cry 
of the plover or the bittern—all are calls as well 
that possess communicative value as signs with a 
meaning. When men began to speak, how various 
where the sounds hit upon by them from the click 
of the African to the liquids, mutes, and vowels of 


136 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


our civilized tongues! But by them all something 
is signified and gets said. 

After the relation of language to the code of signs 
among animals has been fully explored, the ques- 
tions still remain as to its immediate source in the 
case of mankind and whither it tends. “There has 
been a supposition entertained that the peculiar 
sounds of which language is composed arose 
through the joy of playing with sound. ‘The little 
child does not simply imitate the words it hears but 
invents a jargon of its own. ‘This does not seem 
due merely to the difficulty in early childhood of 
repeating the combination of sounds heard, but 
rather to be a creative experiment with syllables 
that delight. So words in early tongues and the 
roots from which they spring have been supposed 
to be onomatopoetic. The charm to the ear of 
certain combinations of sounds would then lead to 
their use as words. But of course no hypothesis of 
the part that sound plays in language formation 
dares to omit the other part, namely, the role of 
sense. In the history of modern philological specu- 
lation two names are prominent. They are those 
of Max Mueller and Dwight Whitney. Max 
Mueller, following Schleicher, conceives of language 
largely as a physical science, but Whitney regards 
language as a human institution growing out of the 
necessity of mutual understanding. 

While we are treading upon speculative ground 


THE LEAD On LANGUAGE 137 


in tracing the origin of language, there is more cer- 
tainty to reward us in the history of language. We 
are able today to distinguish definitely at least two 
great language families. “The first is the Aryan to 
which belong in early times the Sanscrit, the old 
Persian, the Hittite; later, the classical languages, 
Greek and Latin; in modern times, the Romance 
group of French, Spanish, Portugese, and Italian, 
largely influenced by the classical Latin; and finally 
the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon groups. ‘The sec- 
ond great family is the Semitic. It includes Hebrew, 
Aramaic, Syriac, Babylonian, Assyrian, Arabic. 
We are not yet able to group together any other 
large families in this satisfactory way. Right in 
the midst of the great classified families occurs 
Gaelic, Cymric, Basque, Ugro Finnish, and other 
tongues not strictly classifiable. “There is a relation 
between Chinese and Japanese, but the family like- 
ness is not marked. Many are the languages of 
India, all more or less distantly related. “The lan- 
guages of the North American Indians, of the 
Asiatic and African tribes are not as yet strictly 
defined. “There is much research still to be carried 
on, but even where research has been begun, no 
actual relationship has been established. One fact, 
however, is to be noted, namely, that the language 
spoken by any group is not always indigenous but 
may sometimes be borrowed. If there has been 
intercourse with other groups, new forms and 


138 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 





words of other languages find their way in. 
Anthropological groups like the Nordic or the 
Alpine, although they have common physical fea- 
tures, may have very different languages. ‘The pos- 
session of a specific language is the result of a process 
of history and in many cases it can be traced. 

An important fact about language to be noted is 
that it is a growth. It never remains a static repe- 
tition of itself. In languages where literature and 
the standard usage of a certain leadership exist, 
there is some arrest and slowing down in changes 
of language. But even then new words, forms, 
and usages arise. “The people in conversation coin 
new expressive words that for a time are outlawed. 
But at last some of the tabooed words and slang 
expressions are adopted as good usage into the 
written language. New discoveries and inventions 
create a need for new terms; the development of 
science and art demands more exact counters; and 
thus, everywhere, even among civilized people, 
language changes. Where there is no written lan- 
guage, not even this relative stability obtains. The 
tongues of wild tribes are in continuous flux. It is 
very necessary to remember these facts, for they 
show that language is a product of mind. Where, 
as among wild tribes, the mind lives, for the most 
part, in the immediate world of sense, although it 
has its mysteries and religions, the changeableness 
of life is repeated in the turns of language. Where 


_ THE LEAD OF LANGUAGE 39 


civilization and culture create normalities and 
standards, the rate of change is reduced, but still 
dialects live on and there is no complete stoppage 
of the living process even though it is now under 
partial control. 

If as history proves, language cannot be meas- 
ured by the rules of the grammarian, still it is neces- 
sary in any profitable study of its development to 
note its inflections and laws of syntax. Modern 
Aryan languages follow a law known as Grimm’s 
law.” In the same manner there is back of all 
grammar the history by which language acquired 
structure. There are languages like the Chinese 
called agglutinative in which syllables and words 
are simply combined without inflection. But the 
style with which we are more familiar in the Aryan 
and Semitic family is inflectional. The history of 
grammatical forms as language grows mature shows 
a tendency, not toward the increase of forms, but 
toward a reduction and simplification. The older 
dialects and languages are the richest in inflections. 


*?“Grimm’s formula looks thus: 


Greek pb f fed) thie tg. ch 
Peioremeieosbe th t od: hk ¢g 
Pigmome ity tipied)' z tg chk 
which may be expressed generally thus that tenuis (T) be- 
comes aspirate (A) and then media (M), etc., or tabulated: 
Greelg® torts A 
GothicnvAral);M 
BligiiGnt ven sA oT.” 
(Jesperson, Language, p. 44.) 


140 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


In fact, some of the wild tribes have an equally wild 
growth of forms in their speech, a multiplication of 
gender and number that puzzles us. But as culture 
waxes, forms decrease and in our own English lan- 
guage today much more importance attaches to the 
rhetorical order of words than to mere grammatical 
connection. If we compare contemporary with 
Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, we note the differ- 
ence, not merely in vocabulary, but also in the much 
fewer grammatical forms used in modern English. 
Where a language becomes relatively standardized 
through a literature that brings it to its majority, 
like the Bible in the modern High German lan- 
guage, it clings to the forms of the time of fixation. 
This bit of history explains why some modern lan- 
guages are richer than others in grammatical forms. 
Of course, the peculiar genius of a people, especially 
when they are civilized, also counts as a factor in 
determining the formal side of language as much as 
its distinctive vocabulary. 

A factor well worth considering is the inner logic 
of language. A language consists fundamentally 
not of single words but of sentences. Human inter- 
course even under the simplest conditions differs 
from the mere sign communications of the animal 
in its use of the concept. But concepts, which may 
become and do become gradually more and more 
abstract as knowledge grows, never occur alone. 
The simplest form in communicative human lan- 


THE LEAD OF LANGUAGE Bk 


guage is a sentence. The sentence is the grammatical 
term for a judgment. What the living cell is in 
biology, the sentence or judgment is in language. 
It is composite like the cell. But the concept which 
is treated as subject or predicate does not exist sepa- 
rately in actuality. We only analyze a sentence 
into parts as we dissect a flower into parts, for in 
the development of language as the expression 
of thought no one takes a subject and then 
looks about for a predicate and then hitches 
them together, through a copula, like two cars of 
a train. This is the mechanical idea of language 
which treats words as single counters or figures. 
Aristotle had a better conception, for he confines 
himself to the two units, subject and predicate. 
Sometimes as in an exclamation there is a whole 
sentence contained in a single word. When we cry 
“Fire,’’ we actually say, “‘Come, help put out this 
fire.”’ A sentence often gets its start in the action 
expressed in the predicate. Sometimes when a sub- 
ject is mentioned the predicate is understood. It is 
interesting to note in child language how the action 
is all that is expressed. The child says, ““Meouw’’ 
or “Bow-bow.”’ The outstanding action also serves 
as its agent’s name. When the child says “‘Papa’’ 
or ““Mamma”’ it always implies more than an ad- 
dress. Some want also is expressed in the single 
word, We cannot speak or think except in a sen- 


142 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


tence. The simple sentence is the lowest possible 
unit. It is the monocellular structure in language. 
This basal logical fact gives human language its 
unique character and equips it to express the highest 
flights of thought. All logic is finally built upon 
the ukase or judgment. A syllogism is only a rela- 
tion between judgments. Facts, inferences, specu- 
lations—all that thought can give—are the out- 
srowths of the judgment clothed in the sentence. 
Finally, the end of language and its real kernel 
is its meaning. Meaning is the content of thought 
or feeling or volition, and language the container. 
Whatever the changing color of the words, mean- 
ing demands that a choice among the variety of pos- 
sible interpretations of language shall be fairly clear. 
Meaning gives a stability to our modes of expres- 
sion. A shifting or ambiguous meaning is useless. 
And yet, because at their best words “‘half reveal 
and half conceal the sense within,’”’ it is very difficult 
to be minutely accurate. “The only remedy by 
which to secure the most widely understood mean- 
ing is by the use of definition. Literary men, who 
often regard language from the point of view of its 
mere beauty, or who live largely in the world of 
description, like vague, flowing words. But even 
they cannot succeed in minimizing the fact that 
well-understood meaning, without which what 
they say becomes valueless, demands definiteness. 


THROILEAD OR TANGUAGEI) 143 


The sciences and the arts, furthermore, stand in 
need of technical terms. But in the handling of 
language it is necessary to note the danger of losing 
ourselves in words and separating them from things 
and actualities. We cannot live in the world of 
things and objects and neglect words. ‘This is very 
evident in the case of those one-sidedly trained 
scientific students who can carry on experiments but 
lack the command of language required to explain 
adequately what they have done. Their education 
in the right use of language has been neglected. On 
the other hand, we must also avoid the danger of 
losing ourselves in a jungle of words, in our infer- 
ences and speculations in regard to the world of 
spirit. An important problem of meaning is con- 
cerned with the distinction between the literal and 
the symbolic. There is much more symbolism to 
meaning than we ordinarily admit. But we dare 
not let it run wild and rush us into the realm of the 
uncontrolled figurative and allegorical. Directness 
of speech is the first essential of its value as meaning. 
Metaphors and figures are like the ornaments on a 
building; they are beautiful but they are not the 
prime necessity. “There is need today of more ex- 
tensive and careful study of how to dig the last 
ounce of meaning from language. Not only the 
intellectual element must enter into it, but the char- 
acteristics which feeling adds. 


144 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


SUMMARY 


The growth of language helps us to understand 
how society grows in its ideals. It is a basic tool 
which men must use if they are to realize their 
unity. By its means the individual and society fuse 
in thought and feeling. It is provocative of action. 
Language in its richness and depth supplies us with 
an adumbration of a mind far beyond our mind. 
To the extent that God would express Himself He 
needs an organ of language, not only that of in- 
articulate nature, but one of personality. It is 
therefore no accident that Christ as the revealer of 
the Father is called the Word.* What is there 
attributed to Him is not only the redemption of 
men, but also the creation, which indicates that 
there is meaning in the universe only to be found 
and unfolded by us through personality. This is 
the contribution which religion can make to the 
solution of the problem of language. The way of 
insight into language leads therefore into the realm 
occupied by mystery and faith of religion. 


* John I:1 ff. 


GEA BRIX 


THE DRIFT OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 


N a remarkable play, of Thomas Hardy, The 
Dynasts, a picture of the Napoleonic wars is 
painted which amounts to a hypothesis of the 
scheme of human history and development. Great 
masses of men are seen coming on to do battle. 
They march and countermarch and the action 
sweeps on over wide areas. Here a victory occurs 
and there a defeat, and the individual is lost in the 
great mass movements. In the drama enacted the 
separate actors count for little. The lesson of the 
drama and its philosophic import is that men are 
adrift on a great ocean of tremendous power in 
whose sweep they are caught up and tossed about 
at random. ‘There is a fatality at work that moves 
men like the figures on a chess-board. ‘The fatalis- 
tic outlook of Hardy expresses a philosophy of the 
ongoing of human events that is not his alone. The 
last great war, in which the millions were as atoms 
in a mighty movement, seems to have confirmed 
numbers of thinking people in the hypothesis of 
necessity and fate. What did the individual count 
for over against the extent of the forces at battle. 
He was lost in the great action. Puny was man 
145 


146 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


and helpless in his contest with the forces of de- 
struction and engines of war. Is this not a true 
sample of all of history? Man finds himself a play- 
thing in the end of forces that he wrongly thought 
he could control. He deceives himself at first with 
the thought that he is free to make his history and 
to guide his development. ‘This view of human 
development as a course of disillusion’ seems very 
plausible when we look upon history in the large. 

But not all thinkers accept the fatalistic concep- 
tion. ‘There are some who concretely demand, as 
they undertake to analyze history, that before 
sweeping generalizations are made we shall note the 
living details of events. Every event is, after all, 
unique. ‘There is something individual about every 
happening. No two historical occurrences will be 
found to be exactly alike if we carefully examine 
them in their actual settings. The first command- 
ment in history is to portray as faithfully as pos- 
sible, in the light of all obtainable facts, what 
actually took place. With as high a degree of im- 
partiality as can be obtained when the personal, 
political, and national predilections of the writer 
are taken into consideration, the events must be 
chronicled. Into the framework of time and place 
there must be put a true picture of what happened. 

* Spengler in The Decline of the West holds that history 


runs through cycles from progress to decay. He claims the 
evident decay of the West. 


DRIFT OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 147 


Of course it is not only necessary to catechize monu- 
ments, accounts of eye-witnesses, chronicles, and 
diaries, but it is also essential to attempt to analyze 
the motives back of actions. “The advocates of this 
realistic hypothesis of history are afraid of the 
theorists. But can anyone write history without at 
least an implied philosophy creeping in? And will 
not the historical writer who attempts to be as 
objective as possible finally seek for an explanation 
of the events which he chronicles? 

As soon as causes are looked into, a description of 
the course of human development in history cannot 
stop with the recounting of events in a simple, 
straightforward manner. Every student of history 
will finally be compelled to frame some general 
hypothesis inclusive of the facts which he records. 
Objective history cannot remain objective. Eventu- 
ally, it is always put through a process of interpre- 
tation in the human mind. To be sure, the mind 
must endeavor to hold to the objective in digesting 
historical data, but there will always follow of 
necessity, at last, either an expressed or implied 
hypothesis of history. No historian ever quite suc- 
ceeds in getting along without any philosophy of 
history. No matter how individual and unique in 
many features any event is, in order to understand 
its history, we shall at last look for the generic in it. 
History cannot remain a mere matter of the memory 
of multitudinous details. The realist who denies 


148 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


the right of the mind to make a philosophy of his- 
tory remains an atomist. He cannot explain the 
real course of events through his actualistic indi- 
vidualism. 

Carlyle is the literary representative in the Eng- 
lish language of the idea that history is the story of 
the lives of great men. ‘This conception underlies 
his Heroes and Hero-Worship. He does not mean 
that all that goes to make history actually can be 
found in the biographies of the great leaders, but 
rather that the leadership of the world gives history 
its sense of direction. It is not a theory of events 
achieved single-handed, but the accomplishments of 
groups led by individuals who have impressed 
themselves and their ideas on the world. The real 
way to tell the story of human development then 
would be to recount what such leaders, for example, 
as Hammurabi, Moses, Nebukadrezzar, Cyrus, 
Alexander the Great, Themistocles, Socrates, Caesar, 
Napoleon, Washington, and Lincoln, have accom- 
plished, with the aid of the hosts of men who fol- 
lowed them. 

It is not open to dispute that there have been out- 
standing rulers, mighty generals, wise lawgivers, 
far-visioned seers, loving poets, deep thinkers, 
doughty discoverers, thoughtful inventors, courage- 
ous reformers, who have changed the face of history. 
But did great men do it all, or is there also a 
chronicle of the help received by them from the 


SSS a er eR PE CTT 
DRIFT OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 149 


populace? Was McMaster mistaken when he called 
his book ‘“The History of the American People’’? 
Whenever the thoughts and actions of single men 
have greatly affected the course of events, has it not 
been because they succeeded in reading the signs of 
the times, and in them their contemporaries have 
found their own thoughts and aspirations brought 
to a focus? Sometimes they have not been con- 
scious of their representative place and yet they 
spoke the common mind. In many instances great 
men have been ahead of their age and their pro- 
grams have been prophetic. But when history 
caught up with them, even partially, it was not 
because they were largely responsible for the prog- 
ress, but only that they foresaw the future. With- 
out minimizing any contribution that great leaders 
have made, there are in history many happenings 
that cannot legitimately be traced to their influence. 

In opposition both to the faithful transcript of 
the individual happening theory and to the leader- 
ship theory of great individuals is a third school 
that divides history into different streams. Outside 
of their own land, many great leaders exercise little 
or no influence. In various parts of the world 
definite continuities may take place in a national 
history which are not so readily traceable in uni- 
versal history. There is a history of politics, of 
institutions, of industry, of commerce, and other 
human developments. A study of these shows an 


150 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


inner relation and formative powers that are not 
explicable by any transcript, no matter how faith- 
ful, of individual events or through the work of 
great leaders. We know, for example, that in 
political history great advances have surged up from 
below which did not depend upon great thinkers at 
the top. Political history is not identical with 
political philosophy. There have been great 
dreamers of ideal institutions, as Plato in his Repub- 
lic, More in the Utopia, Andreae in Christianopolis, 
Bacon in the New Atlantis, Campanelli in the City 
of the Sun, Butler in Erewhon, but they have not 
affected history greatly. “The one general feature 
common to all these utopias, namely, the need of 
eugenic regulations for the improvement of society, 
did not produce the growing concentration of inter- 
est on the subject, for that is due to biological 
progress. 

If we really study the history of philosophy with 
that end in view, we shall see that although it 
mostly appears to be only an account of the isolated 
speculation of deep thinkers, nevertheless close 
analysis will bring to light plenty of connections 
between these thinkers and their age. We discover 
a thrust and drive, like unto the push upward of 
the sprouted seed, running through all speculation 
either as a reaction or as a consequence. It is re- 
sponsible for an inner logic in the history of thought 
that conditions the channel speculation will take as 





DRIFT OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT § 151 


its bed does the course of the stream. In any review 
of the history of industry or commerce it is also 
noticeable that continuity and progress there depend 
upon many factors. The great inventors by means 
of their great inventions did not single-handed 
create such an upheaval as the industrial revolution. 
Factors other than individual ingenuity are required 
to effect an industrial or commercial advance. 

We need not pause to discuss the narrow view 
that all history should be interpreted in national 
terms. This disposition to glorify the nation to 
which one belongs, and magnify its development 
and its culture as superior to all others, leads a 
nation in its pride to seek the imposition of its ideas 
upon the world. Such nationalism may be mili- 
tary, or it may be rampantly democratic and fail 
to make due allowance for the necessity of different 
forms of government for different people. But 
there is a roomier hypothesis of history than this 
which makes the development of mankind result 
from a progressive embodiment of great ideas and 
ideals. “The German historian Ranke saw in history 
the march of great ideas working out their way in 
the life of peoples. He believed that these ideas 
were divine thoughts in human dress. For this 
conception to become Hegelian it needs only to be 
interpreted as the logical movement of the absolute 
spirit in time. 

The fact cannot be denied that one and another 


152 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


spacious ruling conception has held sway in differ- 
ent ages and times and lands. “The ideal which 
Greek history sought to incorporate was the har- 
mony of life through art; the Roman dream was 
one of orderliness through law; the French national 
purpose the maintenance of independence; the Eng- 
lish ideal constitutional government and liberty. 
The American passion, which is now capturing the 
imagination of the world, is for democracy. It is 
remarkable to find whole ages with such outstand- 
ing characteristics of mind and outlook. The 
ancient world laid all its stress on solidarity. The 
Middle Ages still insisted on the unity of a uni- 
versal empire and church. The modern age con- 
centrates its gaze on the man within and is domi- 
nated by the thought of the rights and privileges 
of common individuals. After full allowance has 
been made for the formative influence of these spa- 
cious ideals, however, there are many facts and 
features in history that do not seem to fit in with 
any claim of sole responsibility for them. That 
theory is partially true, but for the full solution of 
the problem which it raises we must call in the 
necessary moral order of the world. Now this 
moral order is not always respected by men, but 
our business is to learn submission to it every time. 
The history of the world is not always in accord 
with the judgment of the right. As yet the meek 


DRIFT OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 153 


do not govern the world, and the highest principles 
have nowhere yet prevailed. 

The ruling conception of history today ascribes 
human development and the progress of events to 
the pressure of economic forces. What the need of 
food, clothing, and shelter stands for to the indi- 
vidual the great economic necessities stand for to 
mankind. ‘They are supposed to be the source of 
the motives that explain human action in history. 
They supply the background to man’s conquest of 
nature and form the basis of his welfare. The ap- 
propriation of natural resources and the goods 
which shall be made out of these raw materials obey 
the law of supply and demand. The margin or 
surplus which is demanded for progress, the pressure 
of population, the extension of territory, the neces- 
sity of markets for goods, and the control for their 
sake of the sea and the capture of colonies—these 
are the considerations that lead men to the decisions 
and action that determine their history. 

In their first efforts to gain control of nature, 
men began as hunters and fishers, and these primi- 
tive occupations continued to serve until demand 
began to outrun supply. But that condition soon 
forced them to put the soil under cultivation, and 
the agricultural stage set in. “This new age differed 
sharply, socially speaking, from its predecessors. A 
settled mode of life took the place of the former 
migratory existence. But the herding of animals 


154 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


that had been domesticated gave some groups a 
chance to compromise and live a semi-nomadic life 
in search of fresh pasturage. Each of these stages 
developed a specific life of its own. When the day 
of the tribal period drew to a close, and the inte- 
gration of nations began, the direction which it 
gave to the course of history was different among 
the various peoples. Some brought more acres 
under cultivation and grew, some tried to remain 
pastoral, and dwindled, others became carriers of 
commerce. Gradually the discovery of new lands 
and the growth of domestic arts led to the begin- 
nings of the industrial period and the expansion of 
its operations since the invention and use of 
machinery. We are living in this period today. 
It is favorable to the increase of big cities and the 
centralization of men in them over against the 
scattered mode of life in the agricultural period. 
Nations grow to an unwieldy size and their politics 
become subject to the control of economic consid- 
erations. Armies and navies are constantly ex- 
panded in order to follow and protect the trade by 
which the millions at home secure their living, and 
to seek new business opportunities. 

The historian today selects those features that 
are on the side of his explanation that the course of 
history is due to the pressure of economic forces. 
The conflict between Rome and Carthage becomes 
a struggle for economic supremacy in which all 


DRIFT OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 155 


their political and military resources were employed. 
The downfall of Rome was due to the impoverish- 
ment of the soil owing to the growth of badly 
managed great landed estates, the decrease of sep- 
arate better tilled farms, and the careless work done 
by slaves. ‘The death knell of the Middle Ages was 
sounded by the discovery of America, and the con- 
sequent changes caused by the influx of products 
from distant lands. The invention of the printing 
press by popularizing knowledge, stimulated ex- 
periments that opened up new avenues for industry. 
‘The peasants grew restless under the old feudal con- 
trol and sought an extension of their rights. The 
knights became robber barons. A new class com- 
posed of wealthy merchants arose in the cities. All 
of these changes stirred up men against continued 
slavery to precedent and led the way not only into 
the period of the Renaissance but also prepared them 
for the appeal of the Reformation. “The beginnings 
of American independence arose from the necessity 
for more economic freedom in opposition to the 
control of the livelihood of the colonies by England. 
Liberty as an ideal is simply the counterpart of 
freedom in economic life. “The Civil War was due 
to meddlesome interference by the newer American 
with the cotton belt and its slave labor, according 
to the Southern interpretation. The Northern 
ideal that the preservation of the union was a neces- 
sity was an ideal fundamentally resting upon the 


156 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


economic principles that American industrial life 
could not endure part free and part slave. 

Nothing apparently jllustrates better how the 
course of history is due to the pressure of economic 
forces than the last war. A growing restlessness 
existed which was not in the last analysis the result 
of racial and political antipathy. Germany was 
multiplying in population. It needed a larger 
national income, and sought it in colonies and more 
world markets as an outlet for its growing manu- 
factures. Russia could not allow Austria to get the 
upper hand of Slavic people and become their com- 
mercial overlords. She herself needed a trading 
outlet to the Mediterranean Sea. The national 
incomes of the Balkan States were economically 
unbalanced. France had long desired the iron and 
coal of western Germany. Her political claim to 
Alsace-Lorraine was only the sentimental accom- 
paniment of this economic need. England could 
not surrender the enormous revenue and commercial 
advantage from the control of the ocean to the 
growing competition of the German merchant 
marine. ‘The people on the Island of England only 
raised enough food to supply their own needs one 
month out of the twelve. The very life of England 
depended upon markets and carrying in her bottoms 
the manufactures which she exchanged for food. It 
was the world scale on which her industrial opera- 
tions were conducted that made her anempire. But 


DRIFT OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 157 


now that the war is over, her dependencies are seek- 
ing more economic rights and a demand for inde- 
pendence comes to her from Egypt and India. 
Ireland gained her liberty ostensibly as the fruition 
of a dream of freedom fostered for centuries, but 
facts can be marshaled to substantiate the claim that 
what Ireland was really after was to be economically 
less dependent upon England. Japan presents the 
problem of a population fast increasing, all of 
whom find it impossible to make a good living. 
Other lands are trying to debar her emigrants. 
What will this lead to? In this manner fact after 
fact can be cited on the side of an explanation of 
all human history—the migrations and settlements 
of peoples, their breathing spells of peace, their 
making of wars, their losses or gains, their success 
or failure—as due to the pressure of economic forces 
which run their inevitable course and carrying men 
in masses with them. 

But after every fair allowance has been made for 
this point of view of history, does it approve itself 
as a fully adequate hypothesis? It is true that the 
motives of men, when we study the decisions of 
chancelleries and diplomats, the aspirations of kings 
and emperors, and even the appetite for power 
among republics, show that mankind is a good deal 
governed by material considerations. But does it 
follow that no right of way is given to higher 
motives at all, and that the servitude of men to eco- 


158 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


nomic pressure is complete? Are the forces of de- 
velopment in culture purely economic, or is there 
an important stream of cultural history separate 
from the economic among men? Surely it is diff- 
cult to make real culture the outcome as well as the 
concomitant of wealth and prosperity. It is true 
that great advances of the economic order are fre- 
quently accompanied by the flourishing of the arts. 
The period of the Renaissance and the Elizabethan 
age are instances. But while economic well-being 
may give the opportunity for culture, does it start 
or sustain men in this new and different pursuit? 
Another objection to the dictatorship of the eco- 
nomic hypothesis is its under-valuation of every- 
thing intangible. From this economic point of 
view the hunger for liberty is only a false claim that 
rests on an illusion. The religious element of the 
Reformation is a very secondary factor, and no 
credit is given by it to the influence of religious ideas 
in themselves. Men are caught in the economic 
tide, they cannot make head against it and so there 
is also a disregard of leadership. | 

Will it not be truer to all facts to devise a com- 
plex and synthetic hypothesis in explanation of his- 
tory rather than become the victims of this over- 
simplified accounting for it all by the pressure of 
economic forces? ‘There is some truth in most con- 
jectures, and the richness and complexity of human 
history may well draw upon the economic, the 


DRIFT OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 159 


ideal, and the personal element to explain itself. 
Sometimes one and sometimes another element 
stands out more prominently, but in the end all 
codperate in the development of mankind. As the 
key to history is the understanding of society, the 
personalistic conception of society may furnish the 
clue to the underlying unity of all the sub-causes, 


SUMMARY 


The trend of human development in history is 
not mere drift. It is the product of action and 
reaction between mankind and economic forces, 
ideals, and leaders. While men may appear to go 
their own way or to be the slaves of impersonal 
economic forces, still there goes on a working out 
of personality. Is God cut off from history, or are 
there evidences after all that He is present as a power 
that makes for righteousness? Admitting that God 
is not apparent on the surface of history nor at all 
times evident, do men find that He fails them at the 
great crisis? If history can be interpreted person- 
alistically not unfairly in the wide sense, does it not 
call for the presence of God to account for the fact 
that the race at many turning points of its life has 
not run down some steep hill to its own effacement? 


CHAPTER XI 


THE END OF EDUCATION 


HE inquiry which we are pursuing would not 

be complete without a consideration of the real 
end and purpose of education. Education trains 
the mind and shapes society. One of its main in- 
strumentalities is human language. History is 
another, for it seeks to envisage the attainments and 
culture of the past for the guidance that we may be 
able to extract from them. ‘The latter considera- 
tion is an important element in education. Indeed, 
there are those for whom the full meaning of edu- 
cation is the preservation and maintenance of all 
the good bequeathed to us by past ages. But while 
many errors can be avoided through the knowledge 
of history, and while we could not dissever our- 
selves from the traditions and culture of the past 
without suffering great losses, it does not follow 
that this trusteeship of past gains is the total end 
of education. ‘That static view of human develop- 
ment would make no provision for taking advan- 
tage of the great opportunities for progress among 
men. ‘The old is given us for something more than 
to be absorbed, and followed without change. We 
are not only to interpret and apply its best features, 

160 


THE END OF EDUCATION 161 


but also to add other stones to the growing struc- 
ture of human knowledge. It is a bad policy in 
education only to glorify what was and is and to 
become a self-satisfied standpatter. “The conserva- 
tive in education has his place as a check upon the 
wild speculator, the lawless experimenter, and the 
reckless innovator. Since there is a considerable 
amount of haphazard educational trying-out going 
on at present, we must listen to those who insist 
that we perform our duty as trustees of past gains. 
But the past must not enslave us. Not all that is 
past is good, and not all that is modern is evil. We 
must endeavor to make a just appraisal and strike 
a balance between useful traditions and worth-while 
new attainments in order to provide ourselves as 
well as the younger generation the best education. 
The final purpose of education must include the 
whole man in its scope. The training and develop- 
ment of mind is not possible without a correspond- 
ing training and development of the body, also, 
with which that mind is geared. The ancient 
Greeks, who attained the highest average intellectual 
development of any people known to history, were 
never unmindful of the necessity of bodily culture. 
They made gymnastics an essential part of educa- 
tion. Their ideal of the body pictured in their art 
has not been surpassed in its harmony and beauty. 
Our modern life has led to such a general deteriora- 
tion of the body of the pupil aside from the athletic 





162 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


specialization of the few, that the first thing to be 
done often is to give them a course of corrective 
physical treatment. We must give pupils a thor- 
ough physical examination periodically and put 
them through training that will make their bodies 
sound and healthy. Instead, with characteristic 
American exaggeration we overemphasize competi- 
tive athletics and undervalue, or at least underprac- 
tice, general bodily development. The record made 
by our men in the last war when they were exam- 
ined as to their physical fitness is not at all flattering 
tous. ‘The brain cannot function as steadily in an 
unsound as in a sound body. As personalities we 
must depend not only upon our minds to respond 
to our calls for their services but also upon our 
bodies. Psychology both in the case of the child 
and of the mature life shows us the vital necessity 
of a strong and balanced nerve-structure. We are 
unduly sapping these storage batteries of direct and 
reserve power for thought, feeling, and action, by 
much of our present-day high-tensioned living. 
Our education must rise up in open rebellion against 
many conditions of living today, and upon the 
established facts of medical science institute and 
operate a curriculum of bodily development that 
shall act as a corrective. Attention must be paid 
to food, clothing, cleanliness, exercise, rest, work, 
fatigue—all the factors that make for healthy, 
normally functioning bodily life. 





THE END OF EDUCATION 163 


One of the results of the physical and mental 
examination of children is the discovery of pro- 
nounced individual differences. [here is no such 
thing as equality of endowment or sameness in 
capacity for education. It has been ascertained that 
a stoppage of growth occurs in minds of a certain 
stamp. ‘Thus, while the body goes on unfolding 
to its full maturity, the mind in many cases comes 
to a place where it stands still. We find people with 
the minds of fourteen-year-old pupils who are 
twice that age. Until some means is found for 
overcoming such a limitation, just treatment re- 
quires us to give these limited minds their full 
chance, but not to press them beyond the capacity 
thus clearly indicated. “The purpose of education 
is not to push pupils taken as they run as far, and 
as fast as possible, up the scale of the curriculum. 
Education serves its purpose best by fitting men and 
women for what they are equipped to know and 
do. The equality of opportunity in education 
which should obtain in a democracy cannot be 
secured by opening the utmost range of the educa- 
tional program to all people, but through appro- 
priate personal treatment which will lead to the 
greatest usefulness, liberty, and happiness of every 
individual in relation to all society. In this way 
the true interest of the community in the stores of 
personality distributed through its membership will 
be conserved. ‘The business of education is not to 


164 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


squeeze men into a curriculum, but to select from 
the curriculum the combination calculated to pro- 
duce the best results in each particular case. 

Of late this conception of education has been 
interpreted in the vocational sense. ‘The best edu- 
cation, it is claimed, is that which fits boys and girls 
directly for what they want to do in life. This 
seems a very wise and practical idea at first sight. 
It appears to avoid the waste of time and energy 
otherwise spent in getting adjusted to one’s voca- 
tion after school life is over. “The school and this 
after-need of making a living are codrdinated. 
Through vocational direction and guidance young 
men and women are led early to choose and then 
begin to prepare themselves for their special place 
in society. Is this not the best way to prevent a 
round peg from being put into a square hole? Are 
we not taking a step far in advance of the past that 
postponed the choice, at least postponed doing any- 
thing much about it until school life was about 
done. Formerly also it was an almost generally 
accepted practice that children would follow the 
calling of their parents. At times this family tra- 
dition in regard to an occupation became burden- 
some and restrictive of true freedom to a son and 
heir in making a satisfactory and happy choice of 
his work in life. A reaction then set in which has 
allowed more range of liberty since. Perhaps on 
this basis there were too many misfits because the 





THE END OF EDUCATION 165 


need of wise direction was somewhat overlooked. 
Is our modern procedure better, and does it com- 
bine most effectively and justly both liberty and 
guidance? Itissoclaimed, and yet its truth depends 
a great deal upon the vocations presented and the 
ideals offered as the basis of choice. Up to this time 
the usual vocational guidance has rested its case too 
much upon material considerations. “The idealistic 
professions and the attractions of these forms of 
Christian service have not been getting their due. 
The controlling consideration presented was that of 
economic need and personal advantage. The church 
has found it necessary to take a stand in its own 
behalf against the prevailing utilitarian trend in the 
work of vocational guidance. The joy of forms of 
service in which pecuniary rewards are a secondary 
consideration is not presented in the usual voca- 
tional scheme. 

The vocational trend in education has not con- 
cerned itself to provide ways and means of allowing 
personality its highest scope. It is taken up with 
economic conceptions of rewards and success which 
are made so attractive that the conclusion reached 
by young people has well been expressed thus: ‘““To 
make the most money possible, in the least time pos- 
sible, and in the easiest manner possible.’’ ‘The 
recommendations, attractive as they are intended to 
seem, have up to the present not been upon the high 
level of man’s capacity for helpful service. There 


pace RSE ST A TT SF EE 
166 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


has also been undue restriction in two other direc- 
tions. The vocational office of education has had 
the endorsement both of capital and labor for seem- 
ingly selfish reasons. The school preparation of 
the boy or girl to take his place in the shop, the 
mill, the farm, and the mine would furnish a steady 
flow of recruits for the constructive operations of 
capital. “he number of workmen with some train- 
ing would be increased. It might even tend to 
lower the wage of labor, and in this possibility 
capital is always greatly interested. On the other 
hand, the labor unions welcomed the chance to cut 
out the low wages paid to the apprentice. They 
could at once enroll the boy and girl in their ranks 
at nearly full pay. 

The other direction in which the vocational in- 
terpretation of the school has restricted real choice 
has been the tendency to take it for granted that the 
vocational guidance in an industrial and manufac- 
turing center should agree with the industrial en- 
vironment, and that in a farming section it should 
be agricultural. ‘This means that a child is to be 
limited in the range of its educational opportunities 
by the accident of its surroundings. The boy of a 
farmer might prefer to become a good mechanic or 
a scholar, but the vocational emphasis would be in 
favor of keeping him on the farm whether he is 
really fit to farm or not. In the same manner, the 
boy in an industrial or mining section ought not to 





THE END OF EDUCATION 167 





be led directly into the vocations about him with- 
out a chance to find out whether he would prefer 
something else. ‘There is a real, undemocratic pres- 
sure brought to bear in the operation of the voca- 
tional choice as it is carried on. ‘The test must be, 
not fitness to respond to immediate economic de- 
mand, but the right of every personality to a full 
range of choice. 

Because such progress has been made in the ex- 
ploitation of our material resources we are apt to 
accentuate the material side of life. That may be 
the reason we are at present lacking in sufficient 
leaders with any other ideal. One-sided vocation- 
alism, in trying to level down all children to com- 
pliance with the vocational demand, makes it hard 
for the exceptional mind to find itself. Youth is 
stampeded into rushing in where there seems to be 
the greatest call and best money reward. If fine 
minds were incited to undertake preparation for 
leadership it would be easier to secure and develop 
leaders. What Cardinal Newman said of the uni- 
versities—that they leveled down great minds—is 
certainly true of vocational guidance in practice at 
present. It is a fact that the members of the mass 
are elevated one or several stages, but one great mind 
lost in the leveling process is not compensated for 
by small advances in multitudes of average intelli- 
gences. The same unjust leveling process is coming 
to be the rule in the colleges and universities, 


168 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


Despite the raising of standards of admission, the 
crowding in of the multitudes leaves no time and 
leisure for special attention to the fewer finer minds. 
Democracy cannot live simply by insuring better 
general education; it also needs to make provision 
for better leadership. Present educational practice 
is not furnishing this, because the economic concep- 
tion of education and its profit motive have pre- 
vailed over the richer, fuller personal development 
theory. 

The end of education and the philosophy sup- 
porting it must favor mental growth in the indi- 
vidual and society. But this progressiveness must 
know how to hold the balance true between social 
growth and the growth of the individuals com- 
posing the group or society. Any system of edu- 
cation that will not give free rein to all that an 
individual is capable of becoming is a violation of 
his rights. Surely it is not just to handicap anyone. 
Life itself later on puts enough obstacles in one’s 
way for progress. The days of education may not 
be checked by the mere overcoming of handicaps. 
It is true, on the other hand, that we fail just as 
disastrously if we prepare an individual to expect 
to have his own way in everything and allow him 
to choose his knowledge altogether according to his 
personal whims. ‘There must be a disciplinary 
residuum; an utterly uncontrolled freedom cannot 
turn out well. Nevertheless, intellectual curiosity 


THE END OF EDUCATION 169 


must have its fling, too, and the utmost joy and 
liberty compatible with making men efficient for 
life with their fellows. “The temper of the over- 
sight exercised should not be justly chargeable as 
either too harsh or too feeble. 

The individual is not getting ready to live as a 
hermit but as a member of society. “Therefore edu- 
cation must be social preparation as well as indi- 
vidual. His sense of social responsibility ought to 
be exercised and developed. Even in a democratic 
society there are necessary limitations and obliga- 
tions to which individuals do well cheerfully to 
consent. It is an utter mistake to allow young men 
and women to grow up without constantly remind- 
ing them of the need of attaining proficiency in a 
multitude of adjustments to the social complex rep- 
resented by the family and the state. Mutual con- 
sideration and readiness for team work must become 
second nature. ‘The fact that if one suffers all 
suffer must be learned for life. No individual ought 
to grow up without making a good beginning in 
treating everyone as an end, as a personality. Sym- 
pathy, kindliness, consideration for others, common 
fairness, justice, honesty, and honor, he should 
agree, are the only negotiable commodities in his 
dealings with them. These social obligations are 
not to be permitted to become enslaving, but on the 
other hand the individual is not to let himself 
become an outlaw living only for himself. Law 


170 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


and order are essential elements as well as liberty in 
the democratic conception of life. They are the 
preservative that keeps our common rights from 
spoiling and maintain the liberty of us all. A 
balanced conception in which both society and the 
individual receive their just due will keep a student 
out of the clutches of the individualistic conception 
of independence which is running riot today and 
making a lawless society. We must get away from 
the eighteenth-century style and make our concep- 
tion of independence in accord with the social 
ideal. We need to do this the more because we have 
lost the other eighteenth-century ideal of ordered 
liberty under law. As soon as the social conception 
is held in proper respect, law will become the ex- 
pression of our common will as we submit to it 
willingly, because we recognize in it the guarantee 
of our rights and liberties. No philosophy of edu- 
cation is adequate which fails in allegiance to an 
ideal of liberty in which the right of the individual 
and the rights of others are fused. This is the root 
of the democratic conception of the way to live for 
which youth must be prepared if the future of their 
lives and of the world is to be safeguarded. 

The dictum has become a commonplace among 
educators that the end of education is not knowl- 
edge but character. But the question then confronts 
us: What form of education will best form char- 
acter? It is evident that preachments are not the 


PHEeRENDIOE EDUCATION 171 


effective way, although great and high ideals on 
exhibit are always useful. Moral purpose ought to 
go into the choice of, and the work done in, every 
branch studied. Every study, not so much, per- 
haps, in content, but in the manner in which it is 
presented, in the methods employed, and the habits 
trained, can become either a hindrance or a help to 
the development of character. “The way of indirec- 
tion here as in all knowledge is an effective example 
of the principle that the minor good is a good and 
a part of the final good. The discipline required 
and the virtue elicited in the competent performance 
of tasks of all descriptions are all making character. 

There are occasions when direct moral teaching 
can be given. But often the silent effect of the 
teacher’s personality gets the better results. Emer- 
son is correct when he says: ‘““What you are speaks 
so loud that I cannot hear what you say.’’ But the 
ultimate thing needed for the making of character 
is the influence of an ideal. Nor will any imper- 
sonal ideal prove adequate. ‘There is greater incen- 
tive in the lives of truly good and great men. The 
greatest character of history, moreover, Jesus Christ, 
leads his admirers into the depths of religion. It is 
the source of supply of the high restraints, the 
strong sanctions, the living motives, the confirming 
faith, the conquering love, and the aspiring hope 
that keep men from faltering in the work of char- 
acter-making. Not only the virtues of assertion 


172 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


and expression, but also those of denial and repres- 
sion—patience, endurance, long-suffering, meek- 
ness, gentleness, humility, which life also demands 
—find their nurture in religion. In the West we 
have been so busy with externals that we have 
missed some of the finer inward conquests, of which 
the Oriental has learned the secret. Our religion 
can lead us to them. Education must prepare for 
conquest both within and without. This cannot 
be done by holding aloof from the mystery of 
religion. It not only rations out comfort, strength, 
and joy, but it also establishes righteousness and 
justice, not upon the police power of force, but 
upon the liberty of love. An educational phi- 
losophy with the religious element left out is 
defective. Men are again coming to realize this, 
and are seeking ways to make use of religion in 
their teaching. 


SUMMARY 


This discussion of the educational problem has 
led us to a clearer estimate of the place of personality 
in the life of the individual and of society. “That 
problem cannot be dealt with upon a mere material 
basis, but a solution to be satisfying must rise to 
the liberty of the children of God and find in Him 
and His Christ its highest ideal. 


PART III 
THE PROBLEMS OF VALUE 





CHAPTER XII 


THE TEST OF TRUTH 


HE study of the make-up and behavior of the 

mind naturally brings us to the problems of 
value. These are really questions which the mind 
takes part in answering, but they form a separate 
group, namely, the sciences of worth or value. The 
first to emphasize in a distinct way that there are 
sets of facts and inferences which have the peculiar 
character of value was Lotze, a German philosopher. 
The three great departments of worth are those of 
the true, the good, and the beautiful. Out of these 
grew the sciences of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. 
When Lotze drew the distinction between values 
and existences he did not intend to throw doubt 
upon the actual existence of the values in addition 
to the appraisal put upon them. But later, in the 
neo-Kantian movement, the valuation category of 
Kant was put to agnostic uses. In other words, 
values were interpreted as appraisals of the mind 
which did not necessarily exist apart from the mind 
making them. This point of view gave the true, 
the good, and the beautiful a very dubious foun- 
dation. If values do not possess any objective 
character, then they may be no more than the 

175 


176 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


illusory creations of human minds. Psychological 
existence is not sufficient to guarantee a claim to 
reality for data; they must be assumed to belong to 
some universal medium beyond human minds. 
Value to remain value, it is clear, must have exist- 
ence back of it. Worth is only real because reality 
beyond it has conferred that value upon it. The 
sureness of values demands more than values. 
Actual being is called for and not mere estimates. 

This question of the merely subjective existence 
of values is the first point to deal with in the dis- 
cussion of what truth is. For there are thinkers 
who consider truth to be only our attitude toward 
existences, that and nothing more. They define it 
as that which we believe to be actual. The bound- 
aries of the realm of truth coincide with the bound- 
aries of our beliefs. If truth is made up only of 
our beliefs then, for example, the life of George 
Washington, what he was and did, is merely certain 
selection of memorabilia and the interpretation put 
upon them that we choose to believe in. These 
data become truth by the act of our attitude of 
acceptance toward them. ‘Truth is the position we 
take toward this and that portion of reality. Noth- 
ing is true except as it is true for us. There can 
always be a gap between truth and reality. Truth 
begins and ends with the extent to which we appre- 
hend existences and interpret them, but their actu- 
ality need not be what we believe of them. Truth 


Rey PESIZOP,VRO PE LA7 


is consequently always relative to our apprehension, 
and it cannot go beyond our understanding of 
phenomena. If this be so, truth is never certain. 
Portions of it have a partial stability conferred by 
the stability of our allegiance to them. Does this 
purely subjective position exhaust the meaning of 
truth, or is there something more rightfully to be 
added? Is truth objective? 

In opposition to the advocates of the doctrine 
that truth is psychological and subjective in char- 
acter, others take the stand that truth is objective. 
For them full truth conforms to, and is identical 
with, reality. It is harmonious with the whole 
realm of being that includes all existences. “The 
whole choir of heaven and earth is the organ voice 
of truth. It is the distilled essence of all being in 
nature and man and God. Our relation to it is that 
of those who begin on its rim and slowly work our 
way toward its center. Its innermost secret is to be 
sought after like the pearl of great price. “The ex- 
periment of the scientist is prompted by the high 
hope that it may open the way to truth new to him. 
The truth still unattained beckons on the poet and 
the philosopher. ‘Truth is not a name for one shift- 
ing belief after another, but for the passage from 
one reality to a deeper. It is as eternal as the reality 
whose stamp it bears, an ideal that invites and 
charms us. Our progress depends upon its power 
to draw us toward itself. Truth must be adored 


178 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


and worshiped, for it is altogether worthy of 
homage. Our highest endeavors fail unless they are 
shot through with this love and pursuit of truth. 
We do not create it by our beliefs. Facts are facts, 
reality is reality; and our aim must be to extract the 
truth from them. ‘There is much that is attractive 
in this view of truth, and it opens up the way to 
the understanding of truth in religion as not simply 
the product of subscription to our creed, but a 
piece of unfailing spiritual reality. 

On the other hand, the exponents of eternal, 
absolute truth travel another road that ends in the 
relativity of our apprehension. ‘They are inclined, 
like Hegel and Bradley, to banish truth from men 
and give it the logically absolute for company. All 
of the truth which we obtain is only partial since 
we are finite, and therefore truth in its full, infinite, 
absolute reality is out of our reach. Our truth as 
partial is partial error, and our error is partial 
truth, because both are incomplete. What better 
off are we, therefore, from this standpoint of the 
logically absolute, since truth is put out of our 
reach by this criterion as it is put out of extra- 
human existence in the subjective interpretation of 
it? Truth as an ideal that can never be reached 
throws us back upon our own imperfect resources. 
The outcome of the hypothesis of the absolute that 
puts truth out of our reach renders it subjective in 
its application of us. Where is the difficulty 


THE TEST OF TRUTH pear BL? 


located? Must we give up expecting either the 
viewpoint of its objectivity or subjectivity to crack 
the enigma? 

Both conceptions agree that truth must gradu- 
ally be appropriated. There is an inescapable sub- 
jective quality in it. The difference between the 
two attitudes is as to whether truth is made by us 
or whether we find it like the prospector finds pay 
dirt. Some affirmations that are unproven beliefs 
are of our creation, but of others our feeling is that 
we have struck pay dirt. We cannot deny the 
strong human conviction that truth is not of our 
making, but at the same time this truth that is not 
of our making we must make it our business to find 
and appropriate. This is the only way in the realm 
of research. In the spiritual realm, religion offers 
us truth, however, as a gift of God through reve- 
lation. Is this greater guarantee in its sphere pre- 
ferable to the ‘‘seek and ye shall find’’ of research, 
or was Lessing correct when he said: “If God 
offered me in one hand all truth, and in the other 
the search after truth, I would say, keep the truth 
for Thyself, only give me the right to search’? Is 
the right of search more profitable than the joy of 
possession, and are we forever, even in the realm 
of the spiritual, to play the part of prospectors? 
What shall we make of the certainty of assurance 
in religion gained through faith? 

There is another group of absolutists who, how- 


180 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


ever, do not found their ideal of truth upon logic 
or reasoning. ‘They are the mystics. “The mystics 
find truth and reality in a single, undivided act. By 
intuition they see all truth without the intervention 
of a logical process. “The slow approach through 
the intellect always fails of its capture in their 
judgment. But when we put ourselves into an 
attitude of quiet, receptive waiting and retire into 
the silences of the soul the eternal light will shine 
through to our illumination. Then everything 
will have become clear without the aid of senses or 
logic. In this way the religious Oriental abandons 
the restless and fruitless active search for their 
satisfaction and plots the death inch by inch of the 
desires and wants of life. He carries the purely 
passive to the verge of unconsciousness, and then 
drops off into the ocean called the absolute. There 
is a Western form of mysticism which does not go 
the full length and so does not experience the tran- 
sition marked by the loss of the self in the absolute. 
But it also, whether it is philosophic or religious 
in its approach, loses itself to the extent of finding 
what it feels to be new and different contacts with 
reality. Out of this abandonment there arises 
knowledge. As a mystic, Jacob Boehme saw the 
world reflected in his pewter plate when the sun 
shone upon it. Visions appear, voices are heard, 
and a great happiness fills the soul. St. Paul is 
lifted up into the seventh heaven and hears the 


(bien OF PRUTH 181 


unspeakable; St. Teresa lives in a marvelous blaze 
of illumination. We cannot deny that mystic ex- 
periences in great numbers are accepted as reality 
and truth by those who have them, but the out- 
standing fact is that the exaltation ascribed to 
fusion with absolute truth usually ends on an im- 
personal note. ‘Then, too, all sorts of beliefs find 
cover under intuition. It has been called the phi- 
losophy of ignorance, and the philosophy of indif- 
ference might also serve as its designation. The 
intellectual truth attained is a heterogeneous mess. 
All shades of Oriental speculation, and all types of 
Christian beliefs, have been derived from mysticism. 

It must not be forgotten that, when Fox stressed 
the inner light, it was after he had acquired a won- 
derful knowledge of the Bible. All surrender to 
the mystic inner light results in an addition, not of 
new truth, but of exaltation to the ideas and con- 
ceptions in which one has grown up. The mystic 
attitude is not truly philosophic but religious. 
Religion needs some measure of the element of mys- 
ticism, but it cannot build itself up completely upon 
it without going off on a tangent and giving a very 
shifting and uncertain meaning to life. Mysticism 
is a necessary part of our whole life, but it is not a 
reliable source all by itself of knowledge. Men are 
deceived when they think to find in it the full source 
of truth. They overlook the fact that intellect 
elbows itself in whenever we claim truth for mystic 





182 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


insight and attribute to it communication of new 
and different contacts with reality. [he world 
found by it remains shadowy and is not the actual 
world. “The God obtained through mysticism only 
is the indefinite absolute. Mysticism can warm and 
intensify the life of intellect, but that is all it can 
do. When we sing about losing ourselves in the 
ocean of God’s love we have previously been taught 
that God is Love, for we did not find this out from 
our emotion. If we are cautious, careful, and 
thoughtful we will not ascribe to mysticism the 
solution of the problem of truth. Romanticism is 
a species of mysticism. It controls the philosophy 
of Jacobi, and has found a new place of importance 
in the speculations of Bergson and Eucken. The 
vitalism of both is an idealism of sentiment. While 
Eucken glorifies work and criticism, his demand for 
creative power is highly charged with a mystic 
current. Bergson openly declares that we can only 
find truth in the impetus of life and by putting our- 
selves within it through intuition. This is roman- 
tic mysticism. Both of these thinkers augment 
their mysticism with much material gained by the 
intellect. “Their romanticism is ultimately incom- 
plete, an emotional rationalism wearing the disguise 
of poetic language. 

In contrast to the speculators who seek an abso- 
lute solution of what truth is there are various 
realistic types of proposed solutions. Truth is held 


The ves OR TRUTH 183 


by some philosophers to be correspondence of our 
thoughts to the actuality of things. The abso- 
lutists conceive of truth as residing in the inner 
coherence and non-contradiction of the world seen 
within the ring of a single great circumference. The 
school of correspondence thinks that truth in our 
minds is the copy of the truth in existence in the 
world without. The degree of the exactness of 
the correspondence is the measure of truth. This 
hypothesis endeavors to combine an objective and 
a subjective side of truth in its embrace. But the 
question arises: On what basis can we assume corre- 
spondence? ‘The inner concept is not the outer 
object. It is only a picture of the reality, a reflec- 
tion cast into the cave. When we note the difficulty 
of establishing a real tie between the outer and 
inner world, and weigh well the fact of the gap 
between the sensation and its object or stimulus, 
how can truth be anything but a truth of adum- 
bration and not one in which reality actively par- 
ticipates? There is no hold upon facts and objects 
in which reality participates in its full strength. 
They are all photographs taken by our sensations 
and our apprehension in which reality may be 
passive. [he same agnosticism to which the purely 
subjective point of view led, and the relativity 
which was the outcome of the absolutist concep- 
tion, are not overcome in the proposed solution of 
truth as correspondence. There is a real world 


184 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


without, but we do not really know that we know 
the object, which Kant called ‘‘Das Ding-an-sich”’ 
(the thing-in-itself). Consequently, how can we 
legitimately speak of correspondence? “To support 
the position that the one blood of truth circulates 
between the observed and the observer, there must 
be knowledge of the world without of a more 
certain kind than that presupposed in the usual 
idea of correspondence. 

In order to meet and overcome the difficulty of 
the rift between the mind and the external world, 
the modern neo-realists and the critical realists 
assert that we are in direct contact with the outer 
existences. “[hese are called entities and are classi- 
fied by the neo-realists as material, ideal, and 
neutral. In other words, it is asserted that we ap- 
prehend reality directly. But the analysis of this 
apprehension in the neo-realistic school amounts, 
as it turns out, to a reduction of the mental to the 
physiological. Sensations are eliminated on the 
score that strictly they are only experiences of the 
mind. Consciousness is almost silenced. With 
much detail of analysis that disfranchises the mind 
and violates logical consistency, it is maintained 
that reality leaves what marks or imprints it chooses 
on our natures. Critical realism is more respectful 
to the ideal in its theorizings and conserves the 
rights of the mind more truly. It is closer to the 
common-sense and naive conception of the reality 


Hob eues he OR Ww RO TH 185 


without which we experience. ‘Truth is the out- 
come of our reaching out and taking hold of what 
is by direct contact. Truth is the name for the 
unity which results from the combination of the 
external world and our mind. Objects and things 
find their way into what is evidently and directly 
experienced by us. ‘Truth is the inter-relation of 
the objective and subjective, but the relation is not 
one of inner coherence nor of mere correspondence. 
Truth is the common name for our experiences as 
they are unified. It is built up from many indi- 
vidual truths. No fact known and critically estab- 
lished need to be denied. And all facts and real 
experiences are woven into the unity of knowledge. 
The woof is the total of experience and the mind 
furnishes the warp into which it is woven. ‘There 
is much of value in the standpoint of critical real- 
ism, if it be looked at from the angle of personality. 
Its danger, as with neo-realism, is the under-valua- 
tion of the subjective, and some of the critical 
realists as, for example, Santayana, have not escaped 
it. Santayana’s world has become more material 
than ideal in his latest speculations. 

Pragmatism is the most widely spread hypothe- 
sis in America as to what truth is. “The name was 
first suggested by William James. The original 
idea is due to Charles Pierce. The pragmatic 
method determines truth by determining whether 
it works out. Truth is verification. It has no 


-- —meae. 


prior existence, but is made in the course of veri- 
fication. In the constant process of human think- 
ing some facts and inferences get themselves estab- 
lished. When they are established they are true. 
If they become disestablished they cease to be true. 
Truth sometimes is simply that which proves itself 
to be expedient. ‘There is no fixed truth existing 
apart from human experiment. Truth is never 
absolute but always only probable. It changes and 
varies with the circumstances of life. “The prag- 
matic ideal as first proclaimed was in danger of 
becoming anarchically individualistic. It seemed to 
say that truth was anything which approved itself 
to anyone. But Schiller in his humanism gave a 
more orderly, social interpretation to pragmatic 
truth. “The greatest exponent of pragmatism after 
James is John Dewey. He has endeavored with 
the aid of co-workers to establish its logic. Devel- 
oped pragmatism presents the following features: 

First, truth sustains the relation of a part to the 
whole in the general evolutionary outlook of the 
present. Often truth is frankly put into the same 
category with oiner biological functionings. “The 
same terms,—the struggle for existence, adaptation, 
survival, selection—are all applied to it. Conse- 
quently the making of truth is a natural process. 
There is no other, no pre-human, established truth. 
Truth, again, is like life, always in the flux and in 
the course of passing through many variations. It 





PHbeLES DOF PRO UT 187 


does not even become fixed as do species. The 
process does not show any signs of coming to a 
halt but is always on the move. The only test of 
truth is its power to succeed. 

Second, truth deals in futures. It has its aim 
ahead, and toward this our gaze must be turned. 
The coming consequences are the important ele- 
ment. But we cannot tell what the consequences 
will be until they arrive. While we have our faces 
set to the future, all this is uncertainty, except 
where the intention is to duplicate prior experience 
as completely as possible. Nothing is sure of inclu- 
sion which does not succeed in being generally 
accepted by men. Past truth has its value only in 
the present, and present contentions will be justi- 
fied according to how they turn out and how widely 
they find favor. It almost seems at times as though 
this conception rests its understanding of truth 
upon the democratic idea of a majority vote. There 
is nothing dominating or overmastering in truth, 
it exercises no autocratic power over the mind. We 
are all in doubt about the truth of anything until 
it has showed off to us and won a favorable verdict. 

Third, truth must possess usefulness. Utility is 
necessary in any applicant for the badge of truth. 
Whatever is not useful is not finally true. Of 
course that makes truth depend upon how utility 
is defined. A very low and material definition may 
be the yardstick. It is generally claimed that the 


188 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


criteria of utility applied ought to be determined by 
the sphere to which the truth belongs. But even 
with this limitation can it be said that utility is a 
sure test of truth? In the long run much truth can 
be made useful to men as they bend to it, but that 
test would put us in constant danger of rejecting 
some truth because it is not immediately seen to be 
useful. Utility at its best and even when carefully 
defined is a poor umpire between truth and non- 
truth. The passing idea of men as to what is use- 
ful is a poor substitute for an inner validity of its 
own. 

Fourth, truth must yield satisfaction. This con- 
tention would support the claim that truth is not 
merely intellectual and abstractly logical. There 
must be in it an outlet of satisfaction for feeling 
and action. In fact, the whole idea of truth is 
activistic. “Truth begins as a claim that needs to 
be established, but that confirmation is forthcoming 
when it satisfies the demands of men. We may ask: 
What are these demands that call for satisfaction? 
Are they always the same? Is there universal agree- 
ment as to what constitutes satisfaction? The 
tendency to stake everything on satisfaction is a 
vain effort to squeeze truth within the compass of 
our desires and wants. ‘Those desires and wants 
are no full or sole criterion of truth. Often truth 
has been compelled to make its way against human 
wishes and impulses. 


WHEAVEST, OF TRUTH 189 


The value of pragmatism lies in its emphasis on 
the problem of verification, but it cannot fully 
answer the question, What is truth? For it, also, 
truth is very relative and changing. It does not 
even provide an adequate explanation of the fixity 
of an historical fact and incident. Is there no way 
out of this maze? Are we condemned to wander 
helplessly in a labyrinth in our search for the 
essence of truth? 

There are some threads of truth, it is evident, 
in all the varying hypotheses. How can we unify 
and synthesize them? Personality offers itself as 
a clearing house spacious enough to contain and 
reconcile them all. “Truth, no matter what its ref- 
erence, has its abode in personalities and must estab- 
lish and make itself at home in the personality of 
individuals and society. It has a subjective side 
with a history full of errors, deviations, and out- 
looks impregnated with relativity. But since per- 
sonality points beyond itself, truth subjective points 
to truth objective which is prior to and beyond the 
truth found and experienced. ‘The value of the 
absolutist position proceeds from this assertion. 
But absolutism fails, as does mysticism also, because 
it takes the truth above man in the universe and 
destroys its final personal character. “The contact 
with the phenomena of all reality does not result 
in the embrace of truth as an ideal, a great unity, 
a high purpose. This cannot be found in abstrac- 


190 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


tion, but only in the key to the universe given by 
its indications of power, wisdom, and heart. These 
indications are signs of personality. The person- 
ality of the human receptacle of truth has for its 
counterpart a revelation which asserts the truth of 
the absolute, infinite personality. 


SUMMARY 


In the quest after truth we cannot exclude the 
minor experiences of life through which we seek 
more and more to learn and know. We pass from 
truth to truth. Error needs to be eliminated and 
truth confirmed. This is the pathway taken by 
research in the world about us. But there is an- 
other pathway, the pathway of a great ideal and 
of a high end. ‘The right impetus to travel along 
this highway can only be found in the faith that 
accepts the eternal as a gift. That reply is made 
in the spiritual realm through personality. The 
best available guidance comes through Christ who 
says: “‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ 


CHAPTER XIII 


THE GOAL OF THE GOOD 


O term is so often upon our lips as the word 
good. We put it to many uses and give it 
many applications. But in all cases we really dis- 
tinguish, at least implicitly, between any particular 
good and the good. A thing that is called good is 
so named because it fulfils the purpose for which 
it was intended. Its qualities rightly fit it for its 
predetermined uses. A good axe is an axe that pos- 
sesses the qualities that do the work of cutting well. 
A good harp is a harp with such properties of tone 
that it produces fine music. But the good is the 
judgment we pass on conduct when it squares with 
the moral purpose of life. It was Aristotle who 
first assigned a purposive element. His whole phi- 
losophy had a teleological cast and stressed final 
cause as most important. Into this view of the 
world he could aptly fit the moral life as the func- 
tioning of the whole man in the way that he was 
designed to function. The final good is the highest 
all-embracing end for which man was fashioned. 
The name given to it is the summum bonum. Man 
is to find the realization and fulfilment of his 
capacity for judgment and action that is morally 
191 


192 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


evaluated at last, far off, in the good. The problem 
of ethics is, therefore, to fill this postulate of the 
good full of content. How shall this end to be 
striven after be best described? What is the nature 
of the purpose that shall make our life attain the 
good? All minor existences have some possibilities 
of good, and the ethical life is one in which to let 
the possible good in everything, in every person, 
and in every situation express itself. But there 
must be one final and highest good which takes up 
into itself all lesser good qualities, and in which the 
aim of the good culminates in its ultimate meaning. 

Not all thinkers are agreed that the best approach 
to the good is to seek and find its end and aim. 
‘There are philosophers who hold that duty is the 
central thing, which must be mainly stressed. Kant 
is the best representative of the advocates of duty. 
From the fact that the will is fundamental, as in 
all action in moral conduct, he argues that nothing 
is unqualifiedly good except the good will. The 
good will is not good because of the end it seeks, or 
the consequences that flow from its acts, it is good 
in itself. It attains this goodness through its ac- 
ceptance of the obligation of duty. Duty speaks 
not in uncertain tones but categorically. In duty, 
the ought of the moral law moves out to its expres- 
sion. We are imperatively bidden to do the right. 
‘That demand is reasonable, for it is based upon the 
acceptance of everyone as an end and none as a 





PHEFGOAL OF (THE, GOOD 193 


means. The maxim of the law is workable that 
urges us so to act that our action can become the 
universal action. However, the heart of ethics is 
not found in the theoretical reason but in the cate- 
gorical imperative, the stern call to follow the 
ought and to fulfil our duty. This bracing and 
quite puritan conception of morals is very effective 
in making strong characters. But does it cover the 
full scope of the good, or does it not rather simply 
describe how the good may function through the 
will? After all, consequences cannot be wisely neg- 
lected nor the purpose back of the ethical life be 
minimized. Once the real goal and end of moral 
endeavor has been located we can better adjust duty 
and virtue toit. “The highest good takes form and 
substance in the right. ‘The law codifies the right. 
Duty then sanctions the right and thus shows the 
way to the realization of the good. Virtue is 
developed through the performance of duty and 
then becomes the habit of doing the good. These 
relationships all point to the supremacy of good as 
purpose over duty as the way of approach to, and 
the end of, ethical science. 

But what content shall the good possess for us 
and toward what end shall we strive? Pleasure is 
one of the earliest and most constant interpretations 
of the good. When life runs smoothly, much 
pleasure is obtained. Pleasure in abundance is the 
natural consequence of physical health; its reactions 


194 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


on the mind add no small sum to the total of joy 
and happiness. The pleasure attached to normal 
action is thus made the total end for which life is 
made. Only those actions are declared good which 
are pleasurable. ‘This naturalistic conception of 
the good reduces it to the level occupied by non- 
human action. ‘There is no real distinction left 
between human moral conduct and other sorts of 
conduct. Duty can find no real office, for the ought 
as a sense of obligation can find no place in a natural 
process and it therefore remains only an expectancy. 
Virtue becomes mere prudence which calculates 
what it is best to do in order to gain and retain 
pleasure. 

The earliest Western philosophic expression of 
the hypothesis of pleasure as the end and aim of 
life is that of the Cyrenaics. “They contended that 
since life is lived from hour to hour we must get 
all the joy that we can out of every fleeting minute. 
We must live and act habitually in a sunny mood. 
It is our privilege to take the cash of the present 
and let our stake of credit in the future go. But 
soon this pleasure of the immediate present and of 
pure sense palled as a steady diet and the hypothe- 
sis was modified. Epicurus made the pleasure, not 
of a moment or a day, but of all life, the highest 
good. To attain the goal thus defined, restraint 
and moderation are needed. It is not in the enjoy- 
ments of the table, the satisfaction of the senses, nor 


THE COAM OR THE GOOD) 1a) 195 


in the gratification of passion that we get the most 
delight. The life of true pleasure is the life that 
goes undisturbed on its way for long, long stretches. 
It cannot be thrown out of its stride and thwarted 
by pain, sickness, or death. Our duty on this defi- 
nition is to secure the most joy possible, on the 
whole, and to add to the pleasures of sense the 
higher enjoyment of things of the mind. 

In modern thinking the hypothesis of pleasure as 
the solution of the problem of human existence has 
found its representatives largely on English soil. 
The period of the development of utilitarian eco- 
nomics also saw the rise of the philosophy of 
hedonism. It began with Bentham in an almost 
Cyrenaic form. Morals were called utilitarian and 
life was good in proportion as its pleasures were 
intense, lasting, fruitful, near, and extensive. Any 
motive that led the way to pleasure was good. But 
soon this extreme position that the business of life 
was the sponging up of pleasure was modified by 
the intellectual utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. 
For him utility meant the greatest pleasure of the 
greatest number. There was quality as well as 
quantity to pleasures, some were lower and some 
higher. The higher pleasures were the ones to 
choose because they agreed better with the dignity 
of human nature. ‘The soberness of Socrates is 
superior to every form of indulgence open to man. 
Mill did considerable to modify the pure hedonism 
of Bentham. Sidgwick still further rationalized 


196 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


the pleasure theory and made reason regulative of 
pleasure. Pleasure was now to be found through 
the prudent ordering of the individual life, through 
benevolence toward others, and through justice in 
which prudence and benevolence are balanced. Still, 
when man sat down to consider the end he desired, 
it remained pleasure. Sidgwick, like all hedonists, 
did not discriminate between pleasure and happi- 
ness. Consequently, even the more rational forms 
of hedonism exalt sense. Hedonism could pre- 
occupy itself with the raw material of life in human 
experience, because it lacked an organizing prin- 
ciple. It was a speculation that did justice to the 
riches of sense, but it contained within itself no 
principle of control even in its effort to rationalize 
pleasure. It is the interpretation of moral life 
which the unthinking multitude adopts when it 
follows its inclinations and desires. “The unre- 
strained mercurialism of the crowd is the hedonistic 
ideal, and its results are by no means enviable. 
Hedonism found a host of additional defenders 
and exponents in Darwinism. The biological em- 
phasis on pleasure as the sign of sound and rightly 
functioning life seemed to furnish fresh support to 
the argument that pleasure is the end of life. The 
pleasurable accompaniments of an action were 
assumed to be the aim of that action. Good actions 
may give pleasure, but do they seek that pleasure as 
their aim? Is not the good the aim and the enjoy- 


Wn GOAOr Tink GOOD 197 


ment the by-product, and do we not sometimes 
even deny the joy for the sake of the good? Evo- 
lutional hedonism found its leading exponent in 
Spencer, although there are many other evolutional 
ethical systems. “These evolutionist schools look 
upon moral conduct as the most highly developed 
and differentiated, to be sure, but as one more form 
of biological behavior. Ethics is the last stage in 
the evolution of action and conduct by which life 
preserves and perpetuates itself, but it is not quali- 
tatively different from other creature action and 
behavior in nature. The mark of its success is its 
power of adaptation, and that adaption is guaran- 
teed by the reward of pleasure attached to it. 
Pleasure is the accompaniment of the fit, survival- 
equipped, and well-adapted life. Duty is a passing 
phase of existence. It arose as an offshoot of exter- 
nal sanctions of society and religion. When that 
outer coercion is transformed into an inner urge, 
then duty begins. Finally, however, as duty be- 
comes the habit of virtue it is absorbed and becomes 
second nature. ‘This is the course of development 
which it goes through in the individual and in 
society. The police and the jails that the com- 
munity now needs will at last be thrown out of 
business by the universal established custom of good 
behavior. Criminal law will have completed its 
services and pass away. he whole history is part 
of the one great natural process in which man, 


198 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


horse, and apple tree are implicated. Man’s so- 
called freedom is but one more device in the total 
evolution and no originative action of his own. 
‘There is no real value mixed in with it all but only 
the operation of a process that can be described in 
terms of natural law. Ethical life is close kin to 
physical life and must be included in the categories 
of natural science and analyzed along biological 
lines. 

Opposed to the advocates of pleasure, as the 
highest good of life, are the defenders of reason. 
How much more noble and calm, they say, is the 
life of reason! In his intellectual development lies 
the hope and strength of man, for that is the one 
attribute peculiar to him. Did not the hedonist 
unwillingly but necessarily cross the border and 
take refuge in the reasonable aspect of life? 
Through it we manipulate our sensations into 
something useful and convert raw-like material into 
permanent values. It is our high prerogative. But 
how does reason develop? Does it mingle and 
combine with the fulness of the sense life, or does 
it endeavor to make life colorless and drab by 
casting out sensation as if it were an evil demon? 

The first rationalists were the Cynics. “They 
identified the life of reason with unconditional sur- 
render to the universe and sought to live conform- 
ably to nature. All civilization and culture was a 
wrong-headed slump into degeneration, therefore 


MUI GOAN OR RHE: GOOD MN 199 


the Cynics returned to the simple life of nature and 
called that performance the real life of reason. It 
is strange that reason could become identified thus 
completely with naturalism and the distinction 
between man and animal be destroyed by the very 
theorists who desired to rescue man from the life 
of sense. Nature driven out by a pitchfork re- 
turned at once. So a more consistent rationalism 
arose in the Stoic school. It taught the law of 
abstinence in the intellectual life which treated all 
things external as things indifferent. Its aim was 
a calm impassiveness impervious to all feeling. The 
richness and fulness of human life gave way to a 
colorless substitute devised by the cold intellect. To 
the demand that restraint be put upon the indi- 
vidual was added the dream of immersion into uni- 
versal humanity. Its motto became: “‘I am a man 
and nothing human is foreign to me.’’ But this 
cosmopolitanism was not one of sympathy but of 
cognition. Its proud possessors esteemed them- 
selves to be the really wise men. ‘They professed 
to live, especially those who followed the Roman 
conception of Marcus Aurelius, a life of severity 
(severitas). As citizens of the world who had 
resolved to accept everything that fell to their lot 
without wincing, nothing could harm them which 
the universe might bring forth. Whatever the uni- 
versal law and fate offered was accepted without 
a flinch or murmur. 


200 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


An element in stoicism is the premium it puts on 
repression rather than expression. A\sceticism is 
the child of stoicism. “The object in life from the 
ascetic point of view is the suppression and not the 
indulgence of desires and wants, the elimination of 
all passions and appetites. In degree, it may be 
more or less stringent, but all types find evil in 
sense, feeling, and emotion. Its paradise is one of 
calm and still quiescence in the cave of reason to 
which it has retreated. Such a control regulates 
life by prohibitions, and maintains its repose by 
more and more complete self-denial. It lays claim 
to special holiness on the ground that it is not 
tainted by the ways of the world, by possession and 
passion. No restless longings torment its soul, 
instead it lives beside the still waters and rests in 
the valley of peace. ‘The intellect carries medita- 
tion upon the ideals of the mind and spirit to a 
pitch of concentration that produces a sustained 
equilibrium. No storms can disturb its cloistered 
and secluded existence in the fair havens of the 
eternal spirit. 

Another form of the rationalistic hypothesis in 
regard to the end and aim of life is the intuitional. 
According to it man has the fundamental moral 
laws in germ within himself. They need only to 
be cultivated and unfolded through experience. 
Clarke claimed that the moral laws were as im- 
mutable as the axioms of mathematics and that 


THE GOAL OF THE GOOD 201 


men had these laws implanted in their constitution. 
It follows from this theory that the ten command- 
ments are written by nature on the human heart 
and that only reasonable consideration on our part 
is required to discover them. It was through the 
reason of the common man that the moral prin- 
ciples could take the field and carry on their opera- 
tions. John Locke in his attack upon innate ideas 
showed how various were the moral notions of 
men. He initiated the application of the historical 
method to this problem, and since his day the 
record of wild tribes has been scanned and a history 
of morals secured which disproves the existence of 
a set of innate moral axioms. Later intuitionists 
shifted their ground and maintained that man had 
an apparatus of response to moral principles and 
was predisposed to accept them. “There was in him 
the form of morals, and training and society fur- 
nished the content. The highest ideals—good, 
duty, and virtue—were claimed to be the frame- 
work of the moral life. Just as Kant argued certain 
categories belonged to the structure of the mind, so 
the intuitionalists attempted to prove the same is 
true of certain categories of morals. Only thus, it 
was supposed, could ethics build on a lasting basis. 
Reason gave it an eternal value. On the contrary, 
however, the reasonableness of moral principles is 
not capable of vindication through the form or 
content of the mind, but through the increasing 


202 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


justification of morals in history. The real basis 
for the permanence of ethical principles lies in the 
existence and validity of a moral order. 

A tendency is present and at work in the world 
in behalf of righteousness. Great principles do not 
live on unless they are necessary to life and form 
an integral part of man’s history. It is not hard 
to show both that certain moral laws positively 
benefit when they are observed and that men suffer 
when they are broken. When honesty, or truth- 
fulness, or purity decrease, a state of unsoundness 
sets in, in society. As injustice and wrong grow, 
friction grows too. Crime demonstrates that we 
cannot live securely without ordering our conduct 
according to the Ten Commandments in their 
essential meaning. In consequence, respect for 
them has become ingrained in human life. This 
domestication goes deeper than convention. It 
bears the earmarks of inner necessity and immu- 
tability. It is on this wise that the reasonableness 
of the moral order can be proved. Men who expect 
to succeed in their aim to live in peace and comfort 
must conform to it, for it is no mere agreement and 
covenant of civilized society. 

But the moral order is not always immediately 
dominant. Injustice and wrong often triumph. 
The righteous suffer want and the wicked flourish 
like a bay tree. Weak nations are oppressed and 
overcome through the greed and economic avarice 


NI EeGO MeOr Vile GOOD 203 


of strong nations. History does not solve all the 
moral problems connected with the inequalities in 
the lot of individuals and of peoples. ‘This diffi- 
culty led Kant, in view of the general trend toward 
the right in the universe and the necessity of its use 
as a frame of the reason, to posit immortality and 
an eternal future in which individual and common 
sufferings of wrong and injustice would be righted. 
The religious belief in the hereafter was interpreted 
as a moral demand in the interest of righteousness. 
With the future life Kant also assumed a rectifying 
moral governor who would be in control of the 
adjustment of the inequalities of justice. He could 
not conceive of a self-adjusting power that makes 
for righteousness. More clearly than Matthew 
Arnold did he detect the implication of personality 
in the moral demand. 

But the indefinite postponement of the solution 
of the problem raised by unpunished transgressions 
of the moral law does not meet the situation fully. 
The existence of evil and sin has been used as a 
weapon against God. It was Hume who put the 
dilemma in a form which has often been repeated 
since his day. Either God is good and does not 
acquiesce in the evil and thus is powerless, im- 
potent, and limited, or He has sufficient power and 
is indifferent. “The absolutists have always solved 
this problem to their own satisfaction quite easily 
by making evil a finite imperfection which would 


204 UNITY OF IRALTH AND KNOWLEDGE 


be overcome in the infinite whole. It is a dishar- 
mony that will find its discords disappear in the 
harmony of the absolute. Bradley will not con- 
cede that there is any morality in the sum total of 
things that he calls the non-contradictory absolute. 
According to him, right and wrong, righteousness 
and sin, are correlatives in a finite world. Just as 
truth is partial error and error partial truth, so sin 
is partial good and good partial evil. This is too 
easy a solution of the problem and underestimates 
the destructive positive force of wrong and of sin. 
As a consequence, the pragmatists of our day have 
sought to relieve God of this blame for unpunished, 
and thus for successful, violations of moral law by 
making Him finite. Following the suggestion of 
Hume, Schiller in the Riddle of the Sphinx posits 
a limited God. James agrees that Schiller is right 
in this supposition. Wells makes God the Invisible 
King, who is one of us in our struggles through 
affairs, conflicts, and evils. As a pragmatic God 
He too is working His way out. Such a God is 
one of the immortals, only a magnified man who 
cannot control nor guide the universe. It is evi- 
dent that the way out here is by the abdication of 
God, just as in absolutism the way out is by empty- 
ing evil of all its badness. 

A possible solution still left to consider was 
advocated by Leibniz in his Theodicy. In part the 
speculation of Leibniz, that this is the best possible 


TOESGOAMFOR RHE GOOD 205 


of all worlds which God could make in view of our 
finiteness, is faulty. Equally he seems on the wrong 
track when, like Augustine, he thinks sin is a 
vacancy waiting for righteousness to remove it, an 
omission rather than a positive defect. But ‘the 
other element on which he lays stress, namely, the 
assertion that the gift of liberty to man by God 
naturally involved the risk of the occurrence of 
wrong-doing, is more fruitful. If man was not to 
be a machine and his every move determined 
fatalistically, but the right of choice and deter- 
mination was to be his, a chance was taken by God. 
God limited Himself in the exercise of His power 
for the sake of man. ‘There seemed no other alter- 
native than either an unfree man or a free man 
subject to the risk of falling. The religious account 
of the coming in of evil through superhuman 
tempting, and the contest between God and the 
devil, does not cancel the existence of human liberty 
in the beginning. [he drama of good and evil is 
now carried on in man through the powers above 
him. Hope looks for the victory of the good and 
the elimination of evil men from the free world of 
happiness hereafter. “This solution is not without 
its difficulties, especially its acknowledgment of the 
existence of evil alongside of an all-powerful good 
God. While it does not solve the problem of the 
origin of evil any more than do other proposed 
solutions, it seems more probable and plausible ix, 


206 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE» 


the light of all facts. It appears as the only one 
possible in the case of some problems. Where other 
speculations offer more difficulties, the solution 
with fewer difficulties seems the more acceptable. 

The final answer as to the goal of ethics can be 
found in personality. Feelings and ideas cluster 
around the determinations that are the core of per- 
sonality which take on a moral color. Those 
choices by which we become personalities are not 
morally neutral in most cases. “They are either 
right or wrong. The central will is free in making 
them to the degree that it knows and feels its re- 
sponsibility and accepts its obligations. “Thus men 
as individuals, and men collectively as society, in 
making their determinations give evidence that they 
are not only units of a psychological kind, but 
unities of an ethical nature. “The end of moral 
striving is the acquirement of a true personality that 
expresses and exemplifies the essential moral axioms 
in balanced harmony. ‘This is the highest good, 
and after it we can and should strive. “The atmos- 
phere in which the development is carried on is an 
atmosphere of freedom, not unlimited in extent, 
but sufficient to allow the making of personality 
both individual and social. 


SUMMARY 


The goal of the good is not attained through 
pleasure nor reason, but through the freely chosen 


i THR GOAM OFTHE GOOD 207 


fulfilment of personality. Back of and reenforcing 
the creative effort spent in growing personality in 
time stands the absolute eternal personality of God. 
He is the final and the complete consummation of 
the highest good. “The God of Christianity is not 
a lonely hermit, but a member of society also. His 
revelation of Himself in the human life of Christ 
opens the way of deliverance to us. 


CHAPTER XIV 


THE BASIS OF BEAUTY 


MONG the ancient Greeks it was customary to 
speak of Ralokagathia (the beauty of good- 
ness). In accordance with the Greek outlook upon 
life as beauty in harmony, the ethical was con- 
ceived of as beautiful. In this way it runs parallel 
to the Hebrew conception of the beauty of holiness. 
The Hebrew ideal was religious, and the Greek 
moral. ‘The fact that beauty was found in the 
good led them to look also for the reverse, namely, 
the good that might be concealed in the forms of 
the beautiful. It was this ideal that moved Plato 
to appear to side with the puritan in his criticism 
of the stories of the gods in Homer as unfit for 
inclusion in the highest culture. Art as ancient 
Greece and its thinkers appraised it could not be 
art for art’s sake alone. “The highest forms of 
beauty in temple and sculpture, in epic and lyric, 
not only put a veto on ugliness but also on the 
ethically bad. Nature could be shown in all her 
unadorned beauty without prudery as long as the 
human portrayal did not add either by expression 
or implication any element of impurity. When 
human passion was portrayed it was not done for 
208 


THEMBASIS OF BEAM TY 209 


the sake of pandering to the passion, nor was it 
exhibited to incite pruriency. All the fine and 
symmetrical lines of the human body were repro- 
duced in sculpture, but it was beauty and not 
nudity that was glorified; hence the Greek tradition 
of the nobility of the human body. ‘The fine 
dignity and carriage of the head characteristic of 
Greek statuary made it an illustration in marble of 
the principle of a sound mind in a sound body. 
The lesson thus read us by the Greeks needs to be 
relearned today. It teaches us that morality and 
beauty cannot be divorced in the highest art. Both 
the foundations of life are injured and true beauty 
is destroyed where this ideal of art is neglected. 
Art must ennoble and purify as well as please. It 
was Aristotle who emphasized the function of art 
as katharsts (cleansing). It takes hold of our feel- 
ings and not only stirs them up, but in the stirring 
ventilates and sweetens them. Thus does truly 
high art act as a purge for our feelings and emotions 
from the low, the mean, and the ignoble. 

In his views of art, there is a peculiar contradic- 
tion in Plato. On the one hand, he puts a low 
estimate upon the productions of the artist. They 
are imitations of material forms. But the reality 
of material forms is denied, for they are just 
shadows of the eternal ideas, according to his phi- 
losophy. Only through their association and fel- 
lowship with the essential reality residing in ideas 


SORE REE SST SL LESS ES, SRSA EEE SESS LER SSS SY eee | 
210 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


have they any being. The artist imitates a shadow. 
His work is the shadow of the shadow, and is there- 
fore at a double remove from the essential reality 
attached to ideas in the eternal heaven of thought. 
But on the other hand, Plato exalts the distilled 
essence of beauty. That mysterious extract of 
beauty is one of the great ideas in his hierarchy of 
ideas, and man must aspire to its society. The 
secret of this beauty is found in the proportion and 
the harmony of an ideal form which serves as an 
invisible matrix for the actual temple or statue. 
Harmony is proposed by other thinkers than 
Plato as the real basis of art. “Those who have 
imbibed the spirit of Greek art are overcome with 
joy and delight by the marvelous balance of lines 
and curves in the best Greek sculpture. “They ad- 
mire the unapproached perfection of form in the 
old temples. What charm there is in the music and 
rhythm of Homer and Pindar! Swinburne with 
his fine ear for the sensous delights of sound does 
but faintly echo the wonderful harmonies com- 
posed of the soft, sweet sounds of Greek poetry. 
How everything is in keeping in the simple struc- 
ture of the Greek drama! Without any of the 
tricks and visual illusions of the modern stage, it 
convoys us into the heart of great human problems. 
Is it not the business of art to present the ideal, to 
sketch the fine curves of this handsome human head, 
a well-shaped nose of another, a gently sloping 





THE BASIS OF BEAUTY 211 





forehead here, shell-like ears, and a delicately curved 
mouth there, and then unite all these perfections in 
the one noble profile? Beauty thus becomes uni- 
versal. This same imaginative regrouping of 
scattered units of sound into the perfected unity of 
a great poem or a great drama, that clothes high 
thoughts in beauteous, harmonious utterance, is art. 
The ideal of harmony is also applicable to painting. 
Good art in painting requires not only the right 
subordination of the background and excellent pro- 
portion in the drawing, but also harmony of color. 
In painting, clashes in color are as little permissible 
as discords in good music. “The use of harmony as 
the key to the beautiful seems to reveal the soul of 
art. 

The modern approach to art has been to specu- 
late about its origin. The inclination to trace 
everything back to its beginnings, in order to make 
it clearer to ourselves is deep-seated. While this 


* “Beauty is never an expression of the individual: its idea 
includes the perfection of those tendencies of form whose ex- 
pression marks the outlines of the race. “Therefore, in attain- 
ing beauty something becomes perfected which is more than 
individual. Here lies the reason of her compelling universal 
character, from everybody’s point of view, provided they are 
alive to similar tendencies of form; for every limited possi- 
bility is only capable of one supreme form of realization. It 
is impossible to conceive a higher degree of harmonious and 
general perfection of the human body than that which Greek 
art has revealed to us; this is why we call its creations abso- 
lutely beautiful.” (Count Keyserling, The Travel Diary of 
a Philosopher, Vol. I, p. 24.) 





212 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


inclination is not to be disregarded, the whither is 
as important as the whence, and the question of 
values should not be overlooked. ‘That art in its 
origin is related to play is one suggestion. Both are 
the outcome of a superabundance of power and life. 
They are an outlet for the overflow of energy 
which has not been exhausted in hard labor. “The 
primitive man began to write in pictures in order 
to communicate with others. But he also started 
drawing crude pictures on trees and stones and the 
tusks of the great mammals for no reasons of utility 
at all. “These latter were not a matter of necessity, 
but an expression of the play-spirit with its abund- 
ance of life in reserve. At dusk, as primitive people 
gathered at the mouth of their caves or in a circle 
about the fire, they began to frolic on their feet 
and the folk-dance was born. Clumsy antics soon 
made way for the expression of the rhythmic in 
movement. Later, this was often accompanied by 
the rise and fall of simple melody in song without 
words. ‘Then came the ballad accompanying the 
dance. Love found something better than prose to 
voice its emotions, the lyric. “The great deeds of 
dead heroes and warriors were recounted as they sat 
about the fire and out of the handing down of their 
feats from generation to generation by word of 
mouth developed folk-tradition and then history. 
A long series of adventures of some fabled hero, his 
amazing courage in battle against enemies, in the 


THE BASIS OF BEAUTY 2h 


slaying of wild beasts, in long exploring journeys, 
also found vent in rhythmic recital, and thus the 
epic was born. ‘Then the need was felt of appro- 
priate comment, and the chorus was introduced to 
follow the recital with telling interpolations. Men 
in the sheer joy of life began to mimic for entertain- 
ment and the dramatic instinct earned its first 
triumphs. 

After men moved out of the cave and into the 
simple hut, in time something more in the way of 
adornment than the necessary shelter was added to 
it, and architecture began. Stones were piled upon 
stones and the pillar thus developed into size and 
majesty sufficient to form the entrance to the house 
of the gods. It was beautified by the leaves of trees 
that breathed into it the spirit of the woods. ‘This 
is the kind of evidence cited in support of the theory 
that art arose as men gave vent to the fulness of 
their lives. “The relaxation found in play was sup- 
plemented by the creative joy put into the effort of 
art. This hypothesis of superabundance of life as 
the source of art is corroborated by history. Great 
periods of expansion and fresh achievement like 
the Renaissance or the Elizabethan age are produc- 
tive of a large outpouring of the surplus power 
required for great art. On the other hand, the 
noblest art is sometimes born in poverty and reared 
in struggle. Great painters and sculptors and 
notable composers who gave the world some of its 





214 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


best art treasures, have had to rely on _ sheer 
indomitableness. Their art was a precious residuum 
of distress and want, for the world frequently failed 
to prove itself worthy of them. And therefore we 
cannot assert as far as the individual artist is con- 
cerned that art always arose from abundance. 
Besides the biological speculation of the over- 
flowing life, there are a number of psychological 
hypotheses in regard to the source of art. And 
perhaps they approach more closely to the heart of 
the problem. Art is a product in which the mind 
participates through its imaginations and emotions. 
The German thinker Lipps proposed the theory of 
Eitnftthlung (feeling one’s way in) as an explana- 
tion of art. Man by sympathetic insight projects 
himself into the world about him, grasps its beauty, 
and then seeks to interpret it. He notes the ways, 
the thoughts, the aspirations, and passions of his 
fellows, and then tries to register them in stone, in 
color, in song, in poetry, in drama, and in fiction. 
There can be no doubt that art cannot be ade- 
quately understood without the aid of imagination 
in its appraisal. Artis not mereimitation. A copy 
is not art. A photograph is not art unless the 
imagination of the photographer has posed some 
scene so as to express beauty. ‘There is a recasting 
of facts through art which comes to something 
more than a mere chronicle of events. Even its 
most realistic representations are not lacking in 


THE BASIS OF BEAUTY 215 





imaginative touches. Its genius and inspiration 
come straight out of creative imagination. Art 
may be analyzed and explained by the intellect and 
the intellect may enter into its production, but it is 
not its progenitor. While the technique of art re- 
quires not only technical skill but also scientific 
knowledge, these do not constitute its essence. No 
more is mere unschooled imagination finally ade- 
quate to produce it. [he construction of a good 
building, the chiseling of an impressive statue, the 
painting of a good picture, the planning of a poem, 
the plot of a drama or novel—all of these demand 
knowledge of a high order as well as imagination. 
Imagination cannot build upon sand; it must build 
upon the solid rock of what man has ascertained 
through his intellect. It must depend on the intel- 
lect again also as its judge and appraiser. Out of 
its criticisms art becomes refined and real standards 
get established. Imagination must be thus sobered 
and controlled, if it is to produce its best results. 
There are other psychological hypotheses as to 
the source of art. Among these an outstanding one 
that may be mentioned is the theory of Kant, which 
assigned the beautiful and the sublime to the judg- 
ment as their fountainhead. In his Critique of 
Judgment he couples the problem of purpose with 
the question of the beautiful. But this theory of 
Kant is too intellectual. It does not give sufficient 
place in its portrayal of the judgment to the imagi- 


SS eee SS Se eee 
216 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


em 


native in man, although it is not overlooked com- 
pletely. Schiller in his aesthetic speculations came 
closer to the truth. For him the beautiful was the 
dominant element and it found its way through the 
heart of man. It lifted him out of the common- 
place and into the sublime. Schopenhauer had a 
pessimistic outlook upon the world and life but he 
found partial deliverance in art from the endless, 
hopeless striving of man. The masterfulness of 
desire, always seeking for satisfaction and unhappy 
in its seeking and equally disillusioned in the pos- 
session of what it seeks, must be abandoned. Sal- 
vation from this sodden misery of man is to be 
found through sympathy. But on the way to 
sympathy there is opportunity for the contempla- 
tion of the beautiful which can also lift man in part 
out of the bondage of a wretched life. “Through 
art man can gain some happiness. We do not have 
to accept Schopenhauer’s pessimism in order to 
ascribe some truth to his evaluation of art as joy. 
There is an elevation of feeling and an element of 
liberation in true art. We can forget ourselves and 
become identified in feeling or imagination with a 
great symphony, a mighty drama, or an ennobling 
novel. We can lose ourselves and find release and 
relief in the contemplation of a beautiful building, 
a fine statue, or a remarkable painting. 

A discussion of art will always have to deal with 
the question: Which is the better motived, the 


THE BASIS OF Dien Wii LV 


classic or the romantic, the ideal or the realistic? 
The classical and ideal clings to what is standard 
and lives in the long tested great creations. In archi- 
tecture it finds its satisfaction in the purity of the 
Gothic, with its thrusts and counter-thrusts, its 
lofty, aspiring columns and pointed arches. There 
is delight for the classicist in a Romanesque with 
its rounded forms, a Byzantine with its high domes, 
a Moorish with its intricate arabesques, and an 
Indian with its richness of pinnacle as it rises in 
pyramidal form. ‘The great planes of the Egyptian 
pyramid as they tend heavenward delight him, and 
he stands in rapt admiration before the Parthenon 
and the broken columns of the great temples. “The 
classicist reads and enjoys his Homer, Virgil, and 
Shakespeare; his Milton, Dickens, ‘Thackeray, 
Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson and Stevenson. 
In music his preference is for the productions of 
Mozart, Hayden, Beethoven, Liszt, Grieg, and 
Chopin. In opera he does not feel called upon to 
drop the lighter classic Italian in order to appre- 
ciate the newer Wagner. ‘The classicist sticks to 
the great accepted and established forms of art. 
The new must wait until proof is forthcoming that 
it can stand the sifting of time. It cannot be denied 
that the classic in all art dwells on the heights. 
While it may seem severe at times and limited in 
its range of taste, still it is full enough of variety to 
contain ample gifts. to satisfy heart and mind. 


218 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


There is nothing trivial and mean about it. Its 
affiliations are with the aristocracy of thought and 
imagination. 

The romanticist claims to dwell closer to men in 
their immediacy. He does not take them up to the 
heights where the air is rare, but stays with them in 
the valleys at their everyday and usual life. 
Romanticism refuses to be tied down by the classic 
models. And in times of upheaval it becomes im- 
pressionistic. Then it strives in painting, music, 
and literature to catch the fleeting mood of the 
present. [he colors it favors are the kind glaringly 
mixed by Whistler. The pure classic music be- 
comes program music which attempts to describe 
moods and emotions. In literature it revels in the 
portrayal of the impulsive side of life and peculiari- 
ties of feeling and emotion. ‘The impressionistic 
school in art is soon displaced by the realistic. In 
fact, modern realism is simply exaggerated impres- 
sionism. For statuary we have odd blocks. Paint- 
ing returns to almost barbaric simplicity. This 
realism is not the naturalism of painfully accurate 
representation, but the realism of unbridled and 
uncontrolled imagination. Cubist art is born of a 
disposition to have nothing to do with the accepted 
and classic. In music the new realism seeks the 
popular by resort to the oddest forms. Strange 
rhythm and syncopation take the place of smoothly 
flowing melody. ‘There is endless repetition of a 


TTHE BASIS OF BEAUTY ong 


very simple theme, which is not varied as in sym- 
phony or fugue, but is a mere tiresome rehearsal of 
abbreviated and syncopated melodic experiment. 
Wild crashes of drums, incoherent drawls of the 
saxophone, truly represent the democratic realism 
of the untutored and uncultivated. Our drama and 
literature are one-sidedly realistic because they can- 
not seem to get away from the sex problem. “They 
belong to the lower average of the commonplace. 
Even when literature deals with high society, as in 
the novels of Edith Wharton, the shady side of its 
life is pictured. Not noble characters, but Arrow- 
smiths and Babbits strut across the scene. Modern 
realism is democracy gone wild. There is a fair 
field for realism to serve as a balance wheel for an 
idealism that overlooks the facts of life. But the 
tendency of realism has always been to look only 
on the slum aspect of life. The evils and sins are 
portrayed in the high lights and the basest is 
thought worthy to be described with artistic skill. 
The claim is made that this realism acts as a cure 
for the evil, but in fact it only develops a slipshod 
tolerance for the low and mean. What art of today 
needs is a return to the purity of the classic 
chastened by a level-headed realism that knows how 
to refrain from excursions into the alleys and 
byways. It was well enough for Dickens to arouse 
our sympathy for the common people. This was 


220 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


the way of true democracy. But literature today 
elects to sit in the seats of the ungodly, to com- 
panion with the worst sinners while it is condoning 
their sins, and to exalt the criminal and the 
abnormal. It is drunken with the amoral, natu- 
ralistic democracy of Walt Whitman. Our age 
needs redemption from Hauptmann, Strindberg, 
and their ilk, and deliverance from the free verse 
of Edgar Lee Masters and his like. 

Has the beautiful merely a subjective background 
or has it an objective basis? In looking out upon 
nature we do not think that we are merely reading 
beauty into it through our imagination. Beauteous 
grandeur is there in the dash and foam of the waves 
of the sea, in the slopes of the majestic mountains 
that glisten in the sunlight, and in their snowy 
peaks glorified by the rays of the sinking sun. The 
valleys with their purling brooks and singing rivers 
speak of beauty. How beautiful is the riot of color 
of the flowers, and the changing reds and grays of 
sunset! ‘The song of the birds fills the air with 
harmony. Wherever we turn, the sense of art is 
awakened in us through nature. It is these appeals 
which have called forth the creation of art by man. 
The subjective side of art is only our response to 
the beautiful all about us. 

But whither does beauty finally lead? There 
has been no nobler answer to this question than 


THE BASIS OF BEAUTY, |!) 221 


Plato’s in The Symposium. He leads us to the 
very throne of God where he says of the beautiful 
as the ideal: 


“‘He who has been instructed thus far in the 
things of love, and who has learned to see the 
beautiful in due order and succession, when 
he comes toward the end will suddenly per- 
ceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, 
Socrates is the final cause of all our former 
toils) —a nature which in the first place is 
everlasting, not growing and decaying, or 
waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one 
point of view and foul in another, or at one 
time or in one relation or at one place fair, 
at another time or in another relation or at 
another place foul, as if fair to some and foul 
to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands 
of any part of the bodily frame, or in any 
form of speech or knowledge or existing in 
any other being, as for example, in an animal, 
or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other 
place, but beauty absolute, separate, simple, 
and everlasting, which without diminution 
and without increase, or any change, is im- 
parted to the ever-growing and perishing 
beauties of all other things.’’’ 


* Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. I, p. 581. 


222 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


SUMMARY 


However we may interpret it, art rests on objec- 
tive existence and depends on subjective appro- 
priation. It must rise from the basis of physical to 
ideal delight and not lose itself in the low and mean. 
Its major benefit to us is the varied power of sug- 
gestiveness with which it points to the God who is 
beauty eternal as the Spirit of Love and Holiness. 


CHAR TERYXV 


‘THE DEMAND FOR THE DEITY 
HERE shall we find the seat of values and the 


ultimate explanation of existence? This 
question is at the bottom of the inquiry whether 
one final demand and one necessary end form the 
core of the synthesis which philosophy seeks to 
negotiate. In the end it is religion that claims to 
supply the answer to the ultimate questions of phi- 
losophy. But at the center of religion is the deity. 
In the course of the examination of the facts that 
point to God both values and existences must obtain 
their final sanctions. ‘These facts can be philoso- 
phically investigated. After metaphysics in general 
has done its best, and the special philosophy of 
religion has turned in its answers, we are in a posi- 
tion to arrive at the ultimate, synthetic hypothesis 
explanatory of the whole. From the point of view 
of philosophy even the synthesis that seems most 
plausible must remain hypothetical. Only the 
affirmations of religion can give assurance and 
validity to the results of philosophic speculation. 
What are the facts upon which the belief in the 
deity rests and how must we rise from philosophy 
toward religion? 

223, 


224 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


One of the important advances of the past cen- 
tury is the granting of scientific value to the psy- 
chology of religion. The fact that religion and 
the belief in a deity are psychological realities is no 
longer denied. But what are the psychological ele- 
ments into which religion may be resolved? In 
the ancient world Petronius claimed that fear made 
the gods. Dread of the strange and the mystical, 
and the shrinking from the forces of nature not as 
yet understood created many taboos. Back of all 
‘this business was the fear of men who sought thus 
to appease the gods. What but fear could create 
such grotesque and awful representations of the 
divine and people the supernatural with demons to 
dread and gods to succor? ‘The claim that the 
sentiment of fear is the source of religion has been 
reasserted in our own day. But Marrett in The 
Threshold of Religion substitutes awe for fear. 
Awe seems to be a nearer right than mere fear as 
an answer to the question: What is the essence of 
religion? Out of awe fear can be derived, but awe 
is more than fear, for it also includes reverence. 
The adoration of the gods is more explicable on 
this basis than upon the supposition of fear alone. 
Real fear is a mark of the degradation of the religi- 
ous attitude rather than of its origin. Man reacts 
toward the superhuman in its mystic hiddenness. 
His sense of the sublime tells him that the super- 
human overpowers and controls all of life, and 


(CoD DEMAND ROR ie DET L2D 


religion is born and grows strong on this same food. 
Among the lower tribes almost every custom and 
practice is conditioned by a religious reference. 
The summing up of the primitive ideas and usages 
seems to point to a final motive of awe more 
strongly than to any other motive in explanation 
of the rise and spread of religion. 

The modern speculations on the psychological 
nature of religion have largely followed the con- 
jecture of Schleiermacher that religion consists in 
the feeling of dependence. While not all of the 
investigators of the phenomena of religion stress 
dependence, they all emphasize feeling in their con- 
clusions. James in his Varieties of Religious Ex- 
perience, Starbuck, Coe, and many other students 
of the psychology of religion, make feeling and 
emotion fundamental. With this governing con- 
ception before them the modern psychologists have 
gathered the emotional experiences of religion 
chiefly. Then, too, there seems to be more in 
common between all religions from the angle of 
emotion and feeling than from any other angle. 
The emotional aspect of religion appeals especially 
to the American temperament and it is the prevail- 
ing religious attitude in Protestantism. The Ameri- 
can Protestant emphasis upon spirituality proves to 
be emotional upon analysis, but in the religions of 
India speculation and the highest intellectual reflec- 
tion are far more prominent. In an examination 


226 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


of all religions, unprejudiced by partisan loyalty to 
any definition of religion, we shall find that feeling 
and emotion are not necessarily the only or even 
the outstanding elements. “There is value and food 
for thought, for instance, in the definition which 
Matthew Arnold gave of religion. He called it 
morality shot through with emotion. While 
emotion is made the strong motivating element, yet 
Matthew Arnold realizes that religion also breaks 
out into action. It includes an ethic and has its 
laws and commandments for a good life. These 
cannot be eliminated as any religion worth the 
name proves, no matter how low its form. Every- 
where in religion the gods possess moral attributes, 
albeit they may be defective, and a moral code, 
incomplete although it may be, is enjoined upon 
men by religious sanctions. All religion links up 
conduct with feeling. In the same manner, no re- 
ligion can get along without its beliefs and creeds. 
‘There are intellectual elements and controlling ideas 
in all faiths, for man cannot feel without feeling 
the need of interpreting the feeling. The emotional 
life seeks a philosophy, and conduct is not content 
until it rests upon the conception of the divine. 
‘The best psychology of religion is that which takes 
into account the functioning of the whole mind in 
religion, for religion is an attitude of creative 
personality. 

What is implied in the grant of good standing 


THE DEMAND FOR THE DEITY 227 


by scholars to the psychology of religion? It im- 
plies, first of all, that religion is a universal phe- 
nomenon of the human mind, and not a peculiarity 
of a few people. Atheism or agnosticism is the 
abnormal attitude. “The statement cannot be suc- 
cessfully disputed that there is no nation or tribe 
without some religion. Occasionally travelers claim 
to have found a people without a religion, but upon 
closer or later investigation it has always become 
clear that they do possess some form of religion. 
The observers have failed because certain earmarks 
of religion were missing and certain kinds of evi- 
dence of religion. But men might admit the uni- 
versal existence of an attitude of awe toward the 
gods and turn around and consider it either a pass- 
ing illusion or a merely subjective fact. The former 
conclusion no one who has studied the matter seri- 
ously proposes. ‘There are, however, those who 
reason that the universal existence of the religious 
attitude and sentiment in the mind of man does not 
watrant our going beyond the position that this 
evidence is subjectively important. But is an objec- 
tive reference impossible? Is it impossible to infer 
a reality corresponding to the desires and longings 
of the human mind as it seeks and searches to learn 
whether it can find God? 

In the Middle Ages, when thinkers deduced far- 
reaching inferences from their first principles, there 
arose a form of argument which strove to establish 


ne SE ETF FOE ETE SSE SR ECSERE  ER SESE ERS  ES ESSIEN SHELLFISH cee ERR TRS 
228 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


the being of God as an intellectual necessity by a 
line of reasoning as cogent as mathematical proof. 
It was Anselm of Canterbury who proclaimed that 
the scriptural term for the atheist, ““The fool has 
said in his heart that there is no God,’ could be 
logically established. “The axiom that ““There is a 
greater than which nothing can be conceived”’ 
gave him his start. His next proposition, ‘““But this 
greatest conceivable will not be the greatest unless 
it exists,’ clinched his point in his estimation. 
Existence would be a necessary attribute of “‘the 
greater than which nothing can be conceived.” 
This is the famous ontological proof. On it, ac- 
cording to Kant, rest all other intellectual proofs of 
the existence of God, and with it they stand or fall. 
Descartes reasserted the soundness of the ontological 
argument for God. For the “greater than which 
nothing can be conceived’ he substituted the idea 
of perfection which is native to our minds. This 
idea (a) must have an adequate cause, and conse- 
quently (b) we can assume a perfect being and that 
it is He who creates the idea of perfection in our 
minds. It is no mere contrast arising from our im- 
perfections and drawn from them by us. Descartes 
further argues that as it is impossible to think of a 
triangle without three angles, for three angles be- 
long to its very existence, in the same manner it is 
impossible to conceive of God without implying 
His existence. 


VHE DEMANDS FOR THE; DEITY pies) 


Both of these methods of proof were attacked. 
Gaunilo replied, in answer to Anselm, that we 
might think of a wonderful island and yet that 
might be no sign of its existence. Kant observed 
that the idea that he had a hundred dollars did not 
prove their existence. He claimed that the idea of 
God includes almightiness, omnipresence, etc., but 
not his existence perforce. His other attributes are 
educible by analysis out of the idea of God, but 
existence is an addition and implies a synthetic judg- 
ment which is not justified under these circum- 
stances. Conceivability does not necessarily guar- 
antee existence. There is a fundamental weakness 
running all through this purely logical effort. It 
rests upon prior teaching about God, and many 
conceptions from the background are smuggled in 
which reason of itself could never find. “The only 
philosophic value in these contentions over the right 
way to infer existence arises from the old argument 
of Parmenides that Being is Being, and that Non- 
being cannot be made the basis of knowledge. 
Now, if God is an implication of being itself and 
being is a necessary assumption, then God is a nec- 
essary assumption. 

The better way is to ask whether the psycho- 
logical belief in a deity implies anything extra- 
subjective? We agree that there are realities to cor- 
respond to our sensations, if we are not believers 
in form of psychological idealism. Our usual prac- 


230 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


tice is to accept actualities and existences which 
satisfy our longings and desires as things really ex- 
ternal to us. May we not parallel this situation 
and assume that there is a reality answering to the 
seeking and longing of mankind in the form of its 
religious aspirations? Perhaps it is possible to go 
further. Many of our longings and desires are 
awakened by stimuli from, and given content by, 
the world without. Can we conjecture correctly 
that in the world of spirit God has endeavored to 
take hold of us by other stimuli that have awakened 
our longings for Him? Whatever be the limit that 
we can legitimately go in our inferences, this much 
remains a fact, that there is more in the universal 
belief in a deity than an accident. Is the search 
after God a fruitless aberration on the part of man 
or a return of his personality to the infinite 
personality? 

As a companion of the psychology of religion, 
the history of religion, chronicles the beliefs of all 
the various faiths of men. For the prehistoric 
period this history is highly speculative. Spencer 
and Tyler gave scientific formulation to the specu- 
lation that religion began historically with the belief 
in ghosts and spirits. Man’s strange adventures in 
his dreams and his observation that at death only 
the breath departed and the rest of the man re- 
mained were supposed to lead to the mythology of 
an inner breath or spirit as the core of the man. 





THE DEMAND FOR THE DEITY Zor 


The possession of a similar core or spirit was attri- 
buted to all existences, and out of human spiritism 
also arose the idea of the great spirit. To this 
hypothesis of animism some added the conjecture 
of Frazer that religion arose when magic broke 
down. Magic was held to be the ancestor of re- 
ligion. But today animism and the theory of magic 
have stepped aside in favor of a newer speculation 
which asserts that men began with a belief in spirit 
in general. ‘This spirit notion was not derived 
from a prior human spirit concept or from magic. 
It has been named Mana, which is the term in New 
Zealand for spirit. Among the Alaskan Indians 
it is called Manitou. ‘The primary assumption now 
used is that man always had a belief in a super- 
human permeating spirit. “This spirit was not dis- 
tinctly personal and not definitely impersonal or 
pantheistic. 

We may couple with this hypothesis the fact 
emphasized by Andrew Lang, namely, that in 
many low forms of religion there exists a distinctly 
superior great god among all the other gods. This 
superior god seems to remain in the background 
and appears rather to be on the decline than to be 
deposing his lesser rivals. It is possible that this 
may help us to understand why gods multiplied in 
the polytheistic religions. “There is no evidence of 
a trend toward monotheism, as the faiths of vari- 
ous cities and districts are combined, and as nature 





232 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


is increasingly deified, but on the contrary we 
find a movement toward multiplication of gods. 
Pfleiderer conjectured that because sun-gods are 
found everywhere religion began with sun-worship. 
But there are too many other gods besides sun-gods 
to warrant any such sweeping inference. “The great 
gods of the remote past are not always sun-gods. 
It is true that sun-gods frequently head the pan- 
theon, but this is not sufficient to prove that they 
were the only early gods from whom the others 
could be derived. All that we can inferentially 
assert with reasonable assurance is that religion 
began with belief in spirit and a great god. This 
is not monotheism nor polytheism, but its affilia- 
tions are closer in tendency to what later became 
monotheism than to impersonal pantheism. 

When we get to more verifiable historical ages 
we find the lowest forms of the possible original 
religion of mana and great god to be fetchism and 
totemism. The former was so named by Des 
Brosses after the Portugese feiticio (late Latin 
factitius). A fetticio was an amulet. This was the 
closest Western term available in naming the usage 
among wild African tribes of taking any object—a 
stone, a splinter of bone, etc.—and making it the 
temporary residence of a spirit-god. “Totemism, as 
illustrated in the Alaskan totem-poles, is the name 
given to the acceptance of a plant or an animal as 
the symbol and incarnation of the tribal spirit, 


THE DEMAND FOR THE DEITY 233 


Most of the polytheistic faiths were naturalistic. 
But side by side with this naturalism went sacrifices 
to the gods, prayers of penitence or adoration, pil- 
grimages, and purifications. All of these practices 
carried these early forms of religion far beyond a 
mere naturalism. While some of the naturalistic 
features of polytheism confirmed men in many 
practices of impurity, especially those connected 
with deification of the fertility of nature, spiritual 
elements were not lacking that pointed in the 
opposite direction. We can see in the growth of 
polytheism two characteristics at work. First, a 
tendency down grade from the early spiritual idea 
resulting in an incapacity to foster moral progress, 
which—as among the Greeks—sometimes destroyed 
a polytheistic faith altogether. Second, a persistent 
endeavor by the use of a pantheism of fate as a 
means to unify and end the confusion raised by 
conflicting gods, but without success. “The spiritual 
elements became submerged and lost out as time 
went on. Then there arose a widespread desire for 
healing and salvation among many nations. ‘This 
starved condition was shown up most strikingly in 
the later Roman Empire, when an epidemic of vari- 
ous Oriental cults swept through the populace. 
The outstanding world-religions are all religions 
of salvation, whether they come out of India, 
Persia, Palestine, or Arabia. Brahmanism and 
Buddhism both sought deliverance from the world 


234 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


of sense through absorption into the Absolute. 
Zoroastrianism dramatized the conflict of good and 
evil with faith in the final victory of Ormuzd, the 
good God. No religion stood closer to Judaism 
than the faith of Zoroaster. With the coming of 
the faith of Israel, not as reduced to practice by the 
people, but in the prophetic ideals, there arose a 
belief in a personal God of righteousness and mercy. 
Israel always conceived it to be its destiny and 
mission to set its face against any relapse into 
polytheistic forms of faith, but only after the exile 
did the Jews conceive of religion in a pure, mono- 
theistic form. Mohammedanism borrowed from 
Judaism and Christianity. Its God remains too 
fatalistic, although he is called merciful. Kismet 
is a mighty force as well as the one God, and thus 
there is a sliding backward and a compromise with 
polytheism. 

The real fulfilment of the spiritual promise of 
early religions is found in Christianity. The trend 
of all faiths and the hopes of all religions find their 
consummation in it. Christianity acts as a cor- 
rective of former aberrations and throws about men 
the atmosphere of faith in God as Spirit. Thus 
does the legitimate hope of religion in the begin- 
ning come to fruition. Central to Christianity is 
the complete and perfect personality. In Jesus all 
the implications of sacrifice undergo sublimation 


THE DEMAND FOR THE DEITY 235 


from a crude material form and receive the ethical 
interpretation of obedience. Prayer shifts its 
ground and becomes vital conversation with the 
Heavenly Father, and not a form of homage end- 
lessly repeated to please the gods. Might in God 
is balanced by love. ‘The new law of life is Love. 
The loftiness of its ethical content is proven by the 
fact that Christianity has responded to every ethical 
summons, and fostered the advance through its 
inner spirit. Any outline of the historical develop- 
ment of religion that does not lose itself in details 
must note that the path of evolution in religion has 
been toward a theistic faith and a personal God. 
But the goal was not attained except in Judaism 
and in its finality in Christianity. It is in this 
interpretation of the history of religion that we 
find its philosophy. ‘There have been a number of 
efforts to reduce all religions to a common denomi- 
nator, and to put Christianity not where it belongs 
in the ranking of religions, but merely as one ex- 
hibit among many. With this plan in mind some 
speculators have written philosophies of religion 
that consist of abstractions labeled God, immor- 
tality, prayer, worship, etc. Not thus, but by a 
real synthetic blending of the salient material sup- 
plied by the history of religion shall we find the 
straight road to the best philosophy of religion. 
This synthesis will bring us out at religious per- 


236 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


sonalism toward which our investigation has 
tended." 

Now that we have shown how the psychology 
and history of religion allow and sustain the in- 
ference of personalism, it is possible to sum up into 
personalism as an all-inclusive unity all our previ- 
ous inferences from nature and mind and values. 
Space is the stage for the activities of creative 
spiritual personality, and time points beyond itself 
to infinite duration for the life of spirit. Quantity 
merges into quality. Causality terminates in order 
at the one end and purpose at the other. It thus 
supplies a ground of the universe which supports 
the best forms of the old cosmological or causal 
argument for God. ‘The world of observation ex- 
hibits power, order, and in some measure purpose. 
The elements sustain relationships one to another 
and the rocks write a story with their strata of an 
orderly universe. But it is in the study of physical 
life that there is an advance upon the testimony of 
mere matter, and purpose and end take on sharper 
and more definite lines. This argument from order, 
purpose, or end is the old physico-theological or 
teleological argument for God. When we leave the 
definitely marked physical and biological realm the 
next upward stage in which we find ourselves, is 

* There has been too much abstract speculation in the usual 


philosophies of religion starting with an effort at the definition © 
of religion from an individual point of view. 





THESDEMANDIFOR IPHEDEDIY 411237 


mind. It is qualitatively different in its character- 
istics from mere natural existences and the former 
evidences of power and order do not obtain. Power 
and order become the power of volition and the 
order of intellect. Mind opens the way to per- 
sonality which proceeds to develop in the individual 
and in society. In personality we reach the north 
star of our synthetic philosophy. But it must 
undergo still further development and find fuller 
interpretation. In language and history and edu- 
cation we note the life of personality working out 
in three directions. [he next corner turned intro- 
duces us to the values of the true, the good, and the 
beautiful, which all take their rise in personality 
and point to an ultimate person in whom they find 
their source and goal. Finally we come in sight of 
the end of our quest in the philosophic hypothesis 
of God as the responsible mover of the whole 
process. After a survey of the psychology of re- 
ligion as we trace its history we arrive at the con- 
clusion that the personal God is the key to a phi- 
losophy able to hold the balance true between the 
realistic and the idealistic, and by transcending itself 
to open up the way for the acceptance of the beliefs 
and experiences of the Christian faith as reasonable. 
It is a joy to note that, though the Christian belief 
in God needs no justification but can live in its own 
right, nevertheless the highest knowledge is not in 
opposition to faith. Foolish is the modern plea that 


238 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


we must either throw overboard the theistic impli- 
cations of the universe or remain agnostic. But 
equally foolish is the attitude which rejects science 
and knowledge with rejoicing and endeavors to 
turn religion into the apotheosis of ignorance. A 
sound philosophy and a right faith are abundantly 
able to live together in peace and harmony. 


SUMMARY 


The psychology of religion attests its universality 
as a truly human phenomenon. Its history is the 
story of how it groped its way to fulfilment in the 
revelation of Christianity. Its philosophy plants 
its feet firmly in the sympathetic appreciation of 
all religions, but reaches its culmination in its reflec- 
tions upon the final religion, namely, Christianity, 
whose center is the divine human personality of 
Jesus Christ. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


INTRODUCTION 


Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy. 

Perry, The Approach to Philosophy. 

Fletcher, Introduction to Philosophy. 

Jerusalem, Introduction to Philosophy. 

Brightman, An Introduction to Philosophy. 

Cunningham, Problems of Philosophy. 

Mathews, The Contribution of Science to Religion. 
Chap. I. 


CHAD VE Rat 
SPACE AND TIME 


Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ‘Transcendental 
Aesthetic.”’ 

Bergson, Creative Evolution. 

, Time and Free Will. 

Alexander, Space, Time and Deity. 

Einstein, Relativity. 

Haldane, The Reign of Relativity. 

Cunningham, Problems of Philosophy, Chap. XII. 

QUANTITY 

Merz, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 
Century, Vol. II, Chap. XIII. 

Kant, Prolegomena. . 

Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis. 

Bosanquet, Logic. 





239. 


240 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


CAUSALITY 


Aristotle, Metaphysics. 

Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Under- 
standing. 

, A Treatise of Human Nature. 

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 

Mill, System of Logic. 

Wundt, Logik. 

Sigwart, Logik. 

Hibben, Inductive Logic. 

DuCasse, Causation and the Types of Necessity. 


CHAP TER II 


Lange, The History of Materialism. 

Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism. 

, The Realm of Ends. 

Merz, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 
Century, Vol. II, Chaps. VI, VII. 

Stewart, Physics. 

Hobhouse, Development and Purpose. 

Reuterdahl, Scientific Theism versus Materialism. 

Brightman, An Introduction to Philosophy, Chaps. 
1B AU Yat IE dB 

Cunningham, Problems of Philosophy, Chaps. X, XI. 

Mathews, The Contribution of Science to Religion, 
Chaps. III, IV. 

Millikan, Science and Life. 


CHAPTER III 


Merz, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 
Century, Vol. I, Chap. V; Vol. II, Chap. VII. 








BIBWIOGRAPLY hl en OA 


Millard, Physical Chemistry. 

Cartledge, Inorganic Physical Chemistry. 
Lowry, Historical Introduction to Chemistry. 
Soddy, Chemistry of the Radio-elements. 
Ostwald, Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Chemie. 
Masson, Three Centuries of Chemistry. 


CHAPTER IV 


Lyell, Principles of Geology. 

Dana, Manual of Geology. 

Chamberlin and Salisbury, Geology. 

Geikie, The Founders of Geology. 

Grabau, Geology. 

Price, The Fundamentals of Geology. 

Mathews, The Contribution of Science to Religion, 
Chapiex: 

Le Conte, Elements of Geology. 

Zittel, History of Geology and Paleontology. 

Merrill, Contributions to the History of American 
Geology. 


GHAPTERW, 


Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in the Light of 
Recent Philosophy. 

Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin. 

Thomson, Concerning Evolution. 

, What is Man. 

Conn, The Method of Evolution. 

Delage, The Theories of Evolution. 

Geddes, Evolution. — 

Judd, The Coming of Evolution. 

Borroughs, Time and Change. 





242 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


Morgan, Emergent Evolution. 

Curtis, Creation or Evolution. 

Henderson, The Order of Nature. 

Goldsmith, Evolution or Christianity. 

Mathews, Contributions of Science to Religion, Chaps. 
VI, VII, VII. 

Schmucker, The Life of Man on Earth. 

J. M. and M. C. Coulter, Where Evolution and Re- 
ligion Meet. 

Ward, Evolution for John Doe. 


CRITICISMS ON EVOLUTION 


Martineau, A Study of Religion. 

Iverach, Evolution and Christianity. 

Wood, The Religion of Science. 

Kellogg, Darwinism Today. 

More, The Dogma of Evolution. 

Morgan, A Critique of the Theory of Evolution. 
Dawson, Nineteenth Century Evolution and After. 
Zetbe, Christianity and False Evolutionism. 
McCann, God or Gorilla. 

Keyser, The Problem of Origins. 

Sajous, Strength of Religion As Shown by Science. 
Lane, Evolution and Christian Faith. 

Chesterton, The Eternal Man. 


CHAPTER VI 


Mathews, Contributions of Science to Religion, 
hans ws. 

Royce, The World and the Individual. 

Bradley, Appearance and Reality. 





BIBLIOGRAPHY 243 


Pratt, Matter and Spirit. 

McDougall, Outline of Psychology. 

Roback, Behaviorism and Psychology. 

Brett, A History of Psychology. 

Angell, Introduction to Psychology. 

Calkins, Psychology. 

Watson, Psychology from the Standpoint of a 
Behaviorist. 

Stout, Analytic Psychology. 

Bergson, Mind—Energy. 

Kellogg, Mind and Heredity. 

McDougall, The Group Mind. 

Hall, Adolescence. 

Stratton, Experimental Psychology and Culture. 

Buckham, Personality and Psychology. 

Berman, The Glands Regulating Personality. 

Boris Sidis, The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal 
Psychology. 

Holt, The Freudian Wish. 

Binet, Psychology of Reasoning. 

Ribot, Essay on the Creative Imagination. 


CHAD DER LL 


Eucken, Main Currents of Modern Thought, “Per- 
sonality and Character.” 

Shaw, The Value and Dignity of Human Life. 

Seth, Ethical Principles, Part I, Chap. III. 

Wright, Self-Realization, Part II. 

Haas, Freedom and Christian Conduct, Chap. IX. 

Bowne, Personalism. 

Jevons, Personality. 


244° UNITY ‘OF FALRHIAND KNOWLEDGE 


Webb, God and Personality. 

, Divine Personality and Human Life. 

Illingworth, Personality Human and Divine. 

Laird, Problems of Self. 

Merrington, The Problem of Personality. 

Buckham, Personality and the Christian Ideal. 

Walker, The Development of Personality in Modern 
Philosophy. 

Hirzel, Die Person. 





CHAPTER VIII 


Giddings, Sociology. 

, Principles of Sociology. 

Spencer, Principles of Sociology. 

Ross, Principles of Sociology. 

Hetherington and Muirhead, Social Purpose. 

Kidd, Social Evolution. 

, [he Science of Power. 

Wallas, The Great Society. 

, Our Social Heritage. 

Coner, Sociology and Social Purpose. 

Chapin, An Introduction to the Study of Social 
Evolution. 

Blackmar and Gillen, Outlines of Sociology. 

Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order. 

, Social Organization. 

Dealey, A Text-book of Sociology. 

McDougall, The Group Mind. 

, An Introduction to Social Psychology. 

Ellwood, Society and Modern Social Problems, 

Ward, The New Social Order. 

















BIBLIOGRAPHY 245 


Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order. 
, Christianity and the Social Crisis. 
Macfarland, Christian Sociology. 





CHAPTER IX 


Schlegel, Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. 

Bopp, Conjugations Systeme. 

Grimm, Grammatik. 

Humboldt, Ueber das Entstehen der Grammatischen 
Formen u.s.w. 

Curtius, Zur Chronologie der indogermanischen 
Sprachforschung. 

Mueller, Lectures on the Science of Language. 

Whitney, Language and the Study of Language. 

Jespersen, Language. 

Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. 

Bosanquet, The Essentials of Logic. 

Dewey, Experience and Nature, Chap. V. 


CHAPTER X 


Freeman, Methods of Historical Study. 

Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode. 

Harrison, The Meaning of History. 

Lamprecht, What Is History. 

, Die kulturhistorische Methode. 

Droysen, Grundriss der Historik. 

Langlois and Segnobos, Introduction to the Study of 
History. | 

Rocholl, Die Philosophie der Geschichte. 

Sigwart, Logik. 





246 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


Wundt, Logik. 
Rickert, Geschichtsphilosophie in Die Philosophie am 
Beginn des zwangisten Jahrhunderts. 


CHAPTER XI 


Horne, Philosophy of Education. 

Dewey, Democracy and Education. 

Kilpatrick, Source Book in the Philosophy of Education. 

Baumeister, Handbuch der Erziehungs und Unterrichts- 
kunde. 

Doering, System der Paedagogik im Umriss. 

Natorp, Sozialpaedagogik. 

Rein, Paedagogik im Umriss. 

Brown, The Secularization of American Education. 

Cope, Religious Education in the Church. 

Rugh and others, Moral Training in the Public Schools. 

, The Essential Place of Religion in Education. 

Coe, A Social Theory of Religious Education. 

Gentilo, ‘The Reform of Education. 





CHAPTER XII 


Bradley, Appearance and Reality. 

, Essays on Truth and Reality. 

Joachim, The Nature of Truth. 

Royce, The World and the Individual. 

Watson, The Philosophical Basis of Religion. 

James, Varieties of Religious Experience. 

, Pragmatism. 

Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience. 
Inge, Christian Mysticism. 

Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion. 








BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory. 

, [he Influence of Darwin on Philosophy. 
De Laguna, Dogmatism and Evolution. 

Boodin, Truth and Reality. 

Pratt, What Is Pragmatism. 

Moore, Pragmatism and Its Critics. 

O’Sullivan, Old Criticism and New Pragmatism. 





CHAPTER XIII 


Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. 

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason. 
Hyslop, Elements of Ethics. 

Muirhead, Elements of Ethics. 

Thilly, Introduction to Ethics. 

De Laguna, Introduction to the Science of Ethics. 
D’Arcy, A Short Study of Ethics. 

Seth, A Study of Ethical Principles. 
Wright, Self-Realization. 

Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God. 
Taylor, The Problem of Conduct. 
Palmer, The Nature of Goodness. 
Paulsen, Ethik. 

Wundt, Ethik. 

Cohen, Ethik. 

Solovyof, The Justification of the Good. 
Ten Broeke, The Moral Life and Religion. 
Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct. 
Ladd, What Ought I to Do. 

Smythe, Christian Ethics. 

Bowne, Principles of Ethics. 

Haas, Freedom and Christian Conduct. 


247 


248 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


Dresser, Ethics. 

Hobhouse, The Rational Good. 

, Elements of Social Justice. 

Rehmke, Grundlegeung der Ethik als Wissenschaft. 
Calkins, The Good Man and the Good. 


—_———- 





PROBLEM OF EVIL 


Leibniz, Theodicy. 

Lempp, Das Problem der Theodicee. 

Huxley, Collected Essays, I, 192. 

Fuller, The Problem of Evil in Plotinus. 
King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil. 

Lotze, Mikrokosmos. 

McCosch, The Method of Divine Government. 
Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin. 
Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil. 
Sully, Pessimism. 

Orchard, Modern Theories of Sin. 

Temple, Mens Creatrix. 

Burton, The Problem of Evil. 


CHAPTER XIV 


Kant, Critique of Judgment. 

Grosse, The Beginnings of Art. 
Santayana, The Sense of Beauty. 

Carritt, The Theory of Beauty. 

Knight, The Philosophy of the Beautiful. 
Raymond, Art in Theory. 

Langfeld, The Aesthetic Attitude. 
Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic. 

Puffer, Psychology of Beauty. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 249 


Gordon, Aesthetics. 

Babbit, The New Laokoon. 

Lessing, Laokoon. 

Merz, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 
Century, Vol. IV, Chap. VII. 

Lange, Wesen der Kunst. 

Cohen, Aesthetik. 

Lipps, Grundlegung der Aesthetik. 

Gross, Der Aesthetische Genuss. 

Dessoir, Beitraege zur Aesthetik. 

Alexander, Nature and Human Nature, Chap. V. 

Buermeyer, The Aesthetic Experience. 


CHA RP ERIOG. 


* PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


James, Varieties of Religious Experience. 

Coe, The Psychology of Religion. 

Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion. 

Ames, The Psychology of Religious Experience. 
Leuba, A Psychological Study of Religion. 
Selbie, The Psychology of Religion. 

Pratt, The Religious Consciousness. 

, Psychology of Religious Belief. 
Stratton, The Psychology of Religious Life. 





HISTORY OF RELIGION 


Chantapie de la Saussaye, Religionsgeschichte. 
Tiele, Outline of the History of Religion, 
Moore, History of Religions. 

Menzies, History of Religion, 


250 UNITY OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 


Barton, The Religions of the World. 

Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion. 

, Introduction to the Study of Comparative 
Religions. 

Frazer, The Golden Bough. 

Hopkins, Origin and Evolution of Religion. 

Lowrie, Primitive Religion. 

Lang, The Making of Religion. 

Schaarschmidt, Die Religion. 





PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 


Collingwood, Religion and Philosophy. 

Hoeffding, Philosophy of Religion. 

Jastrow, The Study of Religion. 

Eucken, The Truth of Religion. 

Farnell, The Evolution of Religion. 

Mueller, Natural Religion. 

Tylor, Primitive Culture. 

Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion. 

Rohde, Psyche. 

Wundt, Voelkerpsychologie, Band IV. 

Simmel, Die Religion. 

Dessauer, Leben, Natur und Religion. 

Zeller, Ursprung und Wesen der Religion. 

Troeltsch, Religionsphilosophie in Die Philosophie am 
Beginn des zwangisten Jahrhunderts. 

Otto, Das Heilige. 

, Aufsaetze das Numinose betreffend. 

Mathews, Contributions of Science to Religion, 
Part III. 

Radhakrishnan, The Reign of Religion in Contem- 
porary Philosophy. 





BIBLIOGRAPHY JAS S| 


THEISM 


Flint, Theism. 

Harris, Philosophic Basis of Theism. 

Bowne, Theism. 

Micou, Basic Ideas of Religion. 

Martineau, A Study of Religion. 

Walker, Christian Theism and a Spiritual Monism. 

Caldecott and Mackintosh, Selections from the Litera- 
ture of Theism. 

Balfour, Theism and Thought. 

Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in the Light of 
Recent Philosophy. 

Matthews, Studies in Christian Philosophy. 

Davidson, Recent Theistic Discussion. 

Patrick, Introduction to Philosophy, Chap. X. 

Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology. 

Wieman, Religious Experience and Scientific Method. 

Macintosh, The Reasonableness of Religion. 

An Outline of Christianity, Vol. IV, Christianity and 
Modern Thought. 

Reuterdahl, Scientific Theism versus Materialism. 


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